Clean .com.google.Chrome.* in /tmp

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Recently, I found there were huge amount of files named .com.google.Chrome.* be created in my /tmp folder. Obviously the culprit is Chrome. However, after some research no solution is found to prevent Chrome creating these garbage.

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/tmp$ du -csh .com.google.Chrome.*

8.0K    .com.google.Chrome.00OKwD
104K    .com.google.Chrome.013jYf
172K    .com.google.Chrome.015x5t
...
48K     .com.google.Chrome.Zytrhf
16K     .com.google.Chrome.zz233G
36K     .com.google.Chrome.ZzrsZY
163M    total
/tmp$  find /tmp -name ".com.google.Chrome*" -ls| wc -l
3468

Update 2020/12/12 I found there are lots of .com.google.Chrome.* files in /tmp/snap.chromium/tmp :-( . Look at the ncdu results:

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--- /tmp/snap.chromium/tmp -------------------------------------------------------------------------
                         /..
    4.1 MiB [##########] /.com.google.Chrome.xTBobr
    4.1 MiB [######### ] /.com.google.Chrome.0hcsFR
    4.0 MiB [######### ] /.com.google.Chrome.YdhzL5
    4.0 MiB [######### ] /.com.google.Chrome.nJ5W3A
    4.0 MiB [######### ] /.com.google.Chrome.unS6es
...
 Total disk usage:   6.8 GiB  Apparent size:  12.1 GiB  Items: 482530

Now the cleanup script has been updated.

The listed files were created within two days! Looks that it’s harmless, huh? Definitely NOT! By default, Linux will cleanup the /tmp at boot. If your system is rarely reboot:

  • These files might make your disk full
  • Huge amount of files in /tmp will block your system boot

Refer to this post: # A start job is running for Create Volatile Files and Directories

Therefore, I have to make a cron job to automatically cleanup /tmp periodically. The cleanup script cleanuptmp.sh:

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#!/bin/bash
find /tmp -name ".com.google.Chrome*" -mtime +0.5 -exec rm -r {} \;
find /tmp/snap.chromium/tmp -name ".com.google.Chrome*" -mtime +0.5 -exec rm -r {} \;

The script will delete all .com.google.Chrome* directories with last modify time 12 hours before.

Since the /tmp/snap.chromium/tmp folder has restricted deletion flag t:

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$ sudo ls -al /tmp/snap.chromium/
...
drwxrwxrwt 887 root root 1114112 Dec 12 11:40 tmp

We need to add a cron job entry to root user by sudo crontab -e:

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15 10,22 * * * /home/xxx/cleanuptmp.sh

It will cleanup the /tmp at 10:15 and 22:15 everyday.