On Thu, May 08, 2014 at 03:44:51PM +0000, LANGLOIS Olivier PIS -EXT wrote:
I was forecasting that this comment would come when I wrote the original request. While I agree with what you say, I think that it is reasonable to let the user have the control over when it is cleaned. Without denaturing the /tmp folder, I'm using it to experiment patches on some packages or launch computation and store results into /tmp to return back at them the next morning. I have been a bit shocked to find out one morning that my files have been deleted by my system. IMHO, this goes against the rule of least surprise which is a pillar of the unix philosophy.
You should create a temporary directory under /tmp for your experiment. Put a file in /etc/tmpfiles.d/mydir.conf with this content: d /tmp/mydirectory mode uid gid and work under that directory; systemd won't clean it. For more information: $ man 5 tmpfiles.d