this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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Alt TextA screenshot of a file manager preview window for my ~/.cache folder, which takes up 164.3 GiB and has 246,049 files and 15,126 folders. The folder was first created about 1.75 years ago with my system

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

This seems like a filename conflict waiting to happen. Why not just mount a tmpfs there?

[–] neonred 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Like I said it's a cheap solution for a single user system. Ofc tmpfs would be better but has to be done for every user again

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago (1 children)

You: It's a single user system
Also you: Tmpfs would have to be done for every user

And a /tmp/ symlink would have to be created for every user too, so I don't get your point

Tmpfs is just as easy as making a symlink, but without the filename conflicts between files in ~/.config/ and /tmp/. You just need to add a line to /etc/fstab

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

/usr/local/sbin/adduser.local

One line in there and you can make it add a new line with appropriate /home/userX/.cache tmpfs line to fstab.

Or, maybe a cleaner way, you might make a init/systemd service that, when booting, would run something like

for each dir in /home do
mount dir/.tmp -type tmpfs
done

I'm not at the computer now and I'm lazy to Google it, so this above is just a pseudo code and probably won't run.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Neat, thanks for sharing

Here's the above pseudocode in bash:

find /home/ -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -exec mount none {}/.cache/ -t tmpfs -o size=16G \;

for doesn't work here because it uses spaces to delimit strings, which could cause issues with filenames that contain spaces

You can also create a systemd user service, which is useful if you don't have root access. The above mount command requires root, but the following doesn't and is more robust than symlinking to /tmp/:

ln -s $(mktemp -dp /var/tmp/) ~/.config/