orbit file

[Rick Stevens]

Fred Grant wrote:
> What are orbit files used for?  I have them in root/tmp among other
> places.  I recently removed some of them. Was this an error on my part?

Those are the UNIX-family of network ports (think of them as named
pipes) for various bits of the GUI system that let them "talk" to each
other.  You may have restart the GUI and log back in to get them back
running ("telinit 3", then log in textually and "telinit 5").

Don't delete them in the future.  If you were to "ls -l" them, you'd
find that they are 0 bytes in length.  They do take up an inode for the
directory entry but beyond that they don't use up any space.  Part of
the startup process of the system (/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit) should purge
/tmp of things that are transient in nature.  Unfortunately,
orbit-related stuff isn't one of them.  It could be added fairly easily.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-           grep me no patterns and I'll tell you no lines           -
----------------------------------------------------------------------