Linux @lemmy.ml Sunny' 🌻 @slrpnk.net 2 wk. ago

My /var/tmp folder is endlessly stacking up on "container_images_storage_xxxxxxxxxx" folders?

The issue at hand: My /var/tmp folder is stacking up on literary hundreds of folders called "container_images_storage_xxxxxxxxxx", where the x's present a random number. Each folder contains the following files called 1, 2 and 3 as seen in thumbnail. Each folder seems to increase in size too, as the lowest I can see is the size of 142.2 MiB, but the highest 2.1GB. This is a problem as it is taking up all my disk space, and even if I do delete them, they come back the next day... I believe this has something to do with podman, but I'm really not quite sure. All I use the PC for is browsing and gaming.

Is there a way to figure out where a file or folder is coming from on Linux? I've tried stat and file, but neither gave me any worthwhile information AFAIK. Would really appreciate some help to figure what causes this, I am still new to the Linux desktop and have no idea what is causing this issue. I am on atomic desktop, using Bazzite:latest.

stat:

stat 1
  File: 1
  Size: 1944283388	Blocks: 3797432    IO Block: 4096   regular file
Device: 0,74	Inode: 10938462619658088921  Links: 1
Access: (0600/-rw-------)  Uid: ( 1000/    buzz)   Gid: ( 1000/    buzz)
Context: system_u:object_r:fusefs_t:s0
Access: 2024-05-06 12:18:37.444074823 +0200
Modify: 2024-05-06 12:22:51.026500682 +0200
Change: 2024-05-06 12:22:51.026500682 +0200
 Birth: -

file

file 1
1: gzip compressed data, original size modulo 2^32 2426514442 gzip compressed data, reserved method, ASCII, extra field, encrypted, from FAT filesystem (MS-DOS, OS/2, NT), original size modulo 2^32 2426514442

32 comments

No idea but I found this: https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/20839
- ouh, nice find! when I do podman info i do fine one line that says
  
  imageCopyTmpDir: /var/tmp
  
  so this must be it? I have had one distrobox set up using boxbuddy, could that be it?
  
  Give this a go:
  
  podman system prune
  
  See if it frees up any space. But it does seem like you're running containers (which makes sense given you're on an immutable distro) so I would expect to be using lots of temporary space for container images.
In any case, it's the temporary file directory so it should be fine to delete them manually.
Just make sure that podman isn't running while you're deleting them, assuming it is podman.
- which is what I am doing, but its constantly being refilled... i delete them now, and they're back again tomorrow...
  
  Set up a cron job to run every hour that deletes them if they are older than 60 mins. Eg:
  0 * * * * find /var/tmp -type d -mmin +60 -exec rm -rf {} ;
If you have enough ram you could make /var/tmp a ramdisk, every reboot will clear it then.
- Is this the kind of thing one can do on atmoic based desktops, if yes, then how? I have 32GB of ram :)
  
  Don't do this... It's a stupid idea.
  
  https://www.linuxbabe.com/command-line/create-ramdisk-linux
  
  Don't, atomic systems aren't made for these kinds of changes.
When using ublue, they have a ujust clean-system that may interest you.
- Thanks, did that the other day but they still came back unfortunately
  
  Do you have any containers? Do you use homebrew?
  
  Please report this to ublue as if this is an actual problem, it might be important.

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