Thousands of zero-length f_symbol files in $TMPDIR directory

Description

In our aleph temporary space, we have over 8000 f_symbol files which have been created just over the past couple of days. I was just curious what creates these files (which look to be pretty much blank files) and whether there was any way to suppress them. Granted, it is temporary space and they are not large. But there are such a large number of them being created that I wanted to check to see if they were really necessary. 

Resolution

We are uncertain exactly how these f_symbol's are used. You could experiment with deleting ones which are zero-length. 

Also: These files are in the $TMPDIR directory. When you restart Aleph, all the files older than 2 days are removed. (This is controlled by the "setenv KEEP_TMPDIR 2" line in aleph_startup.) 

You could restart Aleph more frequently. 

• Article last edited: 8-Mar-2019