From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.75 [en] (X11; U; SunOS 5.6 sun4u) Something on my system deleted most of the files in my home directory, though this excluded a chain of directories that where left containing only a symbolic link. It is just over 10 days since these files where written, and the deletion occured shortly after the machine was started, so I was wondering whether it is possible that tmpwatch has started removing files outside its specified area. Reproducible: Didn't try
no, this is impossible, unless you have changed /etc/cron.daily/tmpwatch script.
I haven't changed /etc/cron.daily/tmpwatch . However spontaneous deletion of files is certainly a bug in my opinion, though I agree it is not necessarily with tmpwatch. I was starting X at the time I noticed it, though the files removed weren't all related to X/gnome. The files were deleted soon after I started the machine up, as my initial login had the Redhat standard prompt, but in a later login it had changed to "bash-2.04$". It is also possible I had a symbolic link to my home directory in files in /tmp in a saved copy of the home directory from a previous installation.
Running rpm -V on installed packages reveals a lot of files on the system that have gone missing. I assume at least some of this deletion happened today as various applications that worked yesterday are no longer working. I think you may want to have another look at this bug report.