Welcome to tmpreaper.

This package provides a program that can be used to clean out temporary-file
directories.  It recursively searches the directory, refusing to chdir()
across symlinks, and removes files that haven't been accessed in a
user-specified amount of time.  You can specify a set of files to protect
from deletion with a shell pattern.  It will not remove files owned by the
process EUID that have the `w' bit clear, unless you ask it to, much like
`rm -f'.  `tmpreaper' will not remove symlinks, sockets, fifos, or special
files unless given a command line option enabling it to.

WARNING:  Please do not run `tmpreaper' on `/'.  There are no protections
--------  against this written into the program, as that would prevent it
          from functioning the way you'd expect it to in a `chroot(8)'
          environment.

Installation is pretty straightforward. On debian systems, it's best
to simply install the tmpreaper package included with debian.
On others:

- Run "make"

- As root, run "make install".

- You now have tmpreaper installed as /usr/sbin/tmpreaper along with a
  manpage in /usr/share/man/man8/ . If these paths don't agree with you,
  you can change these trivially in the Makefile.

- Create a crontab entry such as the following:

0 4 * * * tmpreaper --mtime-dir --symlinks 7d --protect '/tmp/.X*-{lock,unix,unix/*}' /tmp

  This will run every day at 04:00 AM, cleaning the /tmp directory of files
  not accessed withing 7 days, including symlinks. Empty directories not
  modified in the last 7 days will also be removed. The --protect option
  causes tmpreaper to skip files with matching names. You can supply more
  than one --protect option, and you can supply more than one directory
  to be cleaned.
  Feel free to adjust as you wish; see the manpage for options.  You can use
  the --test option to only show what would be done.


Enjoy,
Paul Slootman <paul@debian.org>         2001/06/02
