Which directory contents I can remove??

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Sun, Jun 07, 2009 at 21:19:29 +0930,
  Tim <ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> 
> Doesn't work here (several computers, configured differently, over quite
> a few releases of Fedora), and I don't know why.  I've done the obvious,
> of pruning out the /tmp path from things like the make whatis
> configuration.  And I don't run any additional filesystem indexing
> tools.
> 
> Merely listing the contents of /tmp in a graphical file browser that
> looks at each file, to determine the filetype, will be enough to reset
> the access time, and stop tmpwatch from removing temporary files.  But
> that doesn't explain why tmpwatch doesn't delete old temporary files on
> the boxes that don't have anyone using them.

If you were going to pursue this, first check whether or not something
was changing the access times of the files on the low use machines. This
would determine if something was wrong with tmpwatch or if something
keeps accessing the files. If something is accessing the files, noting the
time of access might help narrow down what is doing the access. You could
compare that time against times that cronjobs are started to see if there
are likely candidates. There are other things (e.g. beagle) besides makewhatis
that recursively paw through files, that may be looking in places they
shouldn't be.