Bug#949698: elogind: deletes users’ files under /dev/shm/ on logout

[Thorsten Glaser]

On Thu, 23 Jan 2020, Dolphin Oracle wrote:

> should you not be using /tmp for that rather that /dev/shm?

No, /tmp is not guaranteed to be tmpfs and so can persist across boots.
On a moderate wide scale of GNU/Linux installations /dev/shm is the
(only) location that fits my (modest — we’re talking about several dozen
bytes and a FIFO or two) needs.

> I think /tmp should be set up as a tmpfs and will then not persist across

Yes, but that’s a local admin choice, and it often is not because some
“enterprise” software writes a lot into it and does not use /var/tmp for
large content.


But that’s besides the question. This behaviour is a grave bug because:

> > logged out from all ssh sessions. In particular, this will also break
> > software that runs as the user, dæmonised, that uses shared memory.

This is inacceptable.


In the meantime, someone told me…

> > If you have to clean up after yourselves, keep a list and track of the
> > files you created and will later need to delete.
> >
> > It might be a good idea to see whether systemd does the same and, if

… that They don’t do that, au contraire, they often leave tons of crap
around in /dev/shm…

bye,
//mirabilos
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