[GLLUG] Sharing /tmp Among Distros

[Melson, Paul]

<p alt="Arnold Dingfelder Horshack">
Oooh!  Oooh!  Mistair Kottair, I know why!
</p>

Because /tmp is often chmod 1777 or 777, there are security risks
associated with having a script (especially an init script, which would
typically run as root) delete content from /tmp.  For example, a
malicious user could create a link from some place in /tmp to
/etc/passwd which could then be unlinked by the init script at boot.
There are ways of mitigating this specific problem (i.e. `find /tmp
-type f |xargs rm`), but it's generally considered a bad practice to
bulk remove content from any world-writable directory.

PaulM

-----Original Message-----
(I have often wondered why most/all distros don't have a line in the
init scripts that cleans out /tmp during either each startup or
shutdown.)