Keeping /tmp contents between boots on Arch

Although dependancy on /tmp is a bad idea, I still want to be able to recover things like OpenOffice and Okular files between boots. You could probably set up where these programs do temporary storage, but this is quicker; open up /etc/rc.inittab anddelete the line “/bin/rm -rf /tmp/* …”.

This works, however old stuff is now never removed, which is bad, so add a new line there, something like “/usr/bin/find /tmp/ -mtime +14 -type f -exec rm -rf {} \; &>/dev/null”. This will make sure files that are over 2 weeks old will be removed.

And since you don’t delete the directory anymore, there are a few mkdir /tmp/… that will give you a warning during boot – just add “-p” to the mkdir arguments and it will be fine.