clearing TMPDIR and LOGDIR

• Article Type: General
• Product: Aleph
• Product Version: 16.02

Description:
The $alephe_root/aleph_startup has lines which are supposed to remove all files but the most recent nn files from $TMPDIR and $LOGDIR, don't seem to work: no files are actually deleted.
What can be done so the files are deleted from the $TMPDIR and $LOGDIR?

Resolution:
Deleting $TMPDIR files while servers or batch jobs are running can definitely be problematic.
There is no reason that $TMPDIR files need to be kept from one ALEPH startup to another.
Startup time is the ideal time to delete them.
I suggest that you remove all the $TMPDIR lines in aleph_startup and simply have these:

echo "Cleaning log files..."
echo " "

cd $TMPDIR
rm *

Deleting $LOGDIR files while servers are running can likewise be problematic.
Deleting all but the nn most recent files at startup time could be OK, but if it's not working, you will need to run UTIL-X-5 with its "number of days to retain" set, for instance, to "2". As long as your servers are restarted nightly or are not idle for more than 2 days, this should work fine even though the servers are up while you are running it.