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From: shankar@hpcll50.HP.COM (Shankar Unni)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Your favourite rm in /tmp (was: Your favourite UNIX-pipe (...))
Message-ID: <820006@hpcll50.HP.COM>
Date: 5 Sep 90 07:13:57 GMT
References: <7249@star.cs.vu.nl>
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Calif. Language Lab
Lines: 23

> >Umm, be careful.  We had a mysterious problem here with X11, where
> >after about 3 days new clients could not be started up to
> >DISPLAY=unix:0.0.  I finally figured out that our /tmp cleanup script,
> >which gets rid of trash which has not been accessed for 3 days, was
> >removing the UNIX(R) domain socket from /tmp/x11-unix.  :-(.
> 
> You mean you put a non-temporary file in /tmp?  Maybe you were asking
> for trouble.  If I want a file to last even a day, I put it somewhere
> other than /tmp or /usr/tmp.

No, this file (/tmp/.X11-unix/hostname:0.0) is most certainly not
permanent, since it is supposed to last only for the duration of the
connection.

Unfortunately, the duration of an X session can be days/months, giving an air
of permanence to such a socket file. If any cleanup script runs in the
meantime, it must be careful not do blow this socket file away.

This is why HP-UX finally went and moved such socket files to
/usr/spool/sockets/X11.
---
Shankar Unni
Hewlett Packard Company