Description of problem:

In /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit there is the following piece of code:


# Clean up /var.  I'd use find, but /usr may not be mounted.
for afile in /var/lock/* /var/run/* ; do
        if [ -d "$afile" ]; then
           case "$afile" in
                */news|*/mon)   ;;
                */sudo)         rm -f $afile/*/* ;;
                */vmware)       rm -rf $afile/*/* ;;
                */samba)        rm -rf $afile/*/* ;;
                */screen)       rm -rf $afile/* ;;
                */cvs)          rm -rf $afile/* ;;
                *)              rm -f $afile/* ;;
           esac
        else
           rm -f $afile
        fi
done

The problem is that after recent changes to dovecot this atempts to
do 'rm -f /var/run/dovecot/login' and loudly complaints because this is
a directory.  OTOH it leaves old /var/run/dovecot/login/ssl-parameters.dat

Instead of trying to keep up with various possible changes there I think
that the following code, which recursively walks through subdirectories, would
be more robust:

remove_files () {
    # use subshell so directory changes and variables
    # are invocation independent
    ( cd "$1" || exit;
    for x in * ; do
	[ -d "$x" ] && remove_files $x || rm -f $x
    done )
}

remove_files /var/lock ; remove_files /var/run

plus possibly some special cases when you want to remove some subdirectories
as well.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
initscripts-8.25-1

How reproducible:
on every startup