is it save to delete things in this directory?? I'm noticing that a part of my harddrive is starting to swell and i think some of the large files are in there. Although i dont know what most of them. Is it safe?

Typically you can delete things in /tmp without much of a problem; however, a few applications store temporary files there. Generally if you delete something, it will simply re-appear later. One critical file may be your mysql.socks file if you are running MySQL.

Also, you may have a tmpwatch file in your /etc/crond.daily directory. tmpwatch automatically prunes the tmp directory of files that have not been accessed frequently.

One last note, if you have scheduled a server backup using the control panel (Raq4's at least), it may occassional dump files into /tmp that are quite large. These are .raq files and can be deleted safely.

To determine the size of individual files, run
du -h *
at the command line
This will list the size of each file in an "human readable" format (the h stands for "human readable" meaning that you get back kb or MB instead of bytes.

the files making the harddrive buldge dont seem to be in that directory,

Did you check this thread?
http://webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?&threadid=7615

My server crashed a week ago because mod_gzip made some huge work files in /tmp, one of them over 25 mb. I turned mod_gzip off but I still don't know why it happened.

Originally posted by eriky
My server crashed a week ago because mod_gzip made some huge work files in /tmp, one of them over 25 mb. I turned mod_gzip off but I still don't know why it happened.


Are you running on Raq4?

I'm thinking about installing mod_gzip myself.

Foun this thread http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=7555&highlight=modgzip

Affraid going to crash server. Customers would not be happy if server goes down for long.

I think the problem was because I didn't have enough memory. I now have 256 mb but because I won't reach my bandwidth limit I not turning it on :D

i have the same problem with mod_gzip filling up /tmp

I have mod_gzip installed on a RAQ4 without any problems whatsoever. It does report errors on 404s, but that's normal.
If you need to install it I would strongly advise using the source version, not the binary, as the RAQ is anything but standard