Prevent a directory in /tmp from being deleted

Question

I often use the /tmp directory on my Linux machine for storing temporary files (e.g. PDFs from a site that wants me to download it first etc.) and I often create a directory with my username. But at every startup it (including all files) gets deleted. Now I know I can put it in /var/tmp, but I want all its contents to be deleted, but for the directory itself to be kept. So:

tmp
 |- me # this should stay
 |  |- foo1 # this should be deleted...
 |  |- bar1 # ...and this as well
 |- other stuff...

Is there any way to do this? Maybe with permissions or with a special configuration?

Answer 1

I use pam-tmpdir for this: it creates a user-private temporary directory at login. To set it up, add

session optional pam_tmpdir.so

to the appropriate PAM services; on a Debian-based system, installing the libpam-tmpdir package will offer to do this for you, or you can add the line to /etc/pam.d/common-session. The next time you log in, you’ll find a directory under /tmp/user with your user id, and TMP and TMPDIR set appropriately.

Answer 2

One solution would be to use a @reboot cron job:

@reboot mkdir -p "/tmp/$USER"

Adding this to your crontab with crontab -e would make it execute whenever the machine boots up.

Or, use

mkdir -p "/tmp/$USER"

in your shell's startup file.

In either case, you may also want to use

TMPDIR=/tmp/$USER
export TMPDIR

in your shell's startup file if you want to use that directory as the default temporary directory.

Answer 3

If you're running no a system with systemd and it uses systemd-tmpfiles to manage the cleanup, then you should configure the directory using that system.

Here's a full documentation. You can likely achieve what you want by creating /etc/tmpfiles.d/something.conf with contents like:

d     /tmp/your_username   0750 your_user your_group  - -

Answer 4

As pointed out in the comments, /tmp is for files that are transient and won't be missed if they're deleted. If you're in the middle of something and the machine reboots, anything you've written there will disappear and you'll have to start over, which means those files might not have been so temporary after all.

I maintained a temporary directory in my home directory for many years starting when a gigabyte was a lot of space and found that it required periodic grooming to get rid of files that had become old and crufty. Most of the time what I had left after that process was less than a couple of weeks old, so I now clean it up with a cron job that runs once daily:

find $HOME/tmp -depth -mtime +30 -print0 | xargs -0 -r rm -rf

Anything I download or create as semi-temporary goes there and the system cleans up anything I leave behind. Anything that needs a permanent home gets one long before the cron job gets rid of it.