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Bug 27145

Summary:	most files deleted from home directory
Product:	[Retired] Red Hat Linux	Reporter:	Michael Young <m.a.young>
Component:	tmpwatch	Assignee:	Preston Brown <pbrown>
Status:	CLOSED NOTABUG	QA Contact:	David Lawrence <dkl>
Severity:	medium	Docs Contact:
Priority:	medium
Version:	7.1
Target Milestone:	---
Target Release:	---
Hardware:	i386
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Fixed In Version:		Doc Type:	Bug Fix
Doc Text:		Story Points:	---
Clone Of:		Environment:
Last Closed:	2001-02-12 14:42:22 UTC	Type:	---
Regression:	---	Mount Type:	---
Documentation:	---	CRM:
Verified Versions:		Category:	---
oVirt Team:	---	RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
Cloudforms Team:	---	Target Upstream Version:
Embargoed:

Description Michael Young 2001-02-12 14:42:14 UTC

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

Comment 1 Preston Brown 2001-02-12 18:31:02 UTC

no, this is impossible, unless you have changed /etc/cron.daily/tmpwatch script.

Comment 2 Michael Young 2001-02-12 19:15:31 UTC

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.

Comment 3 Michael Young 2001-02-13 18:10:52 UTC

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.