Arch Linux

Trevorofmolino

Member

Registered: 2008-07-24

Posts: 37

cron changed

thunderbird was constantly trying to download emails and crtlesc did not biring up task manage, alt+F2 did not bring up search term. so I rebooted and could not get into KDE because user temp failed temporary directories full. i checked /TMP and found KDE-root and cron.y72pDY so do i change, rename or what to get cron back to what it should be?

Profjim

Member

From: NYC

Registered: 2008-03-24

Posts: 658

Re: cron changed

You can do

/etc/rc.d/cron stop
rm -rf /tmp/cron.*
/etc/rc.d/cron start

if you like; it shouldn't hurt anything. (It may kill any cronjobs in progress; at a minimum you won't get mailed error reports from any cronjobs  that do survive past the termination of the cron daemon. However, if your /tmp is full you probably won't get them anyway.)

However, you don't cite any evidence that your /tmp/cron.* folder is what is taking up lots of space. It may be, if some cron job is spitting out loads of output. But I doubt it. Have you run

du -shc /tmp/*

to see where all the space has gone?

Also /tmp is standardly emptied on reboot. My own /tmp is a tmpfs, i.e. it lives in RAM, so it would be wiped on reboot anyway. But I'm pretty sure that even disk-based /tmp is wiped out by either the distro's shutdown script or its startup script.

Last edited by Profjim (2010-04-06 18:16:31)