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I've got a tmp-folder with 14 million php session files in my home directory. At least that's what I think it is, it's not like I could ls it or anything.

I've tried using find with the -exec rm {} \; commands but that didn't work. ls 'sess_0*' | xargs rm did neither.

I'm currently running rm -rf tmp but after two hours the folder appears to be the same size.

How can I empty this folder?

Does anyone have a clue what caused it in the beginning? I don't remember changing anything critical lately.

REFERENCE INFO:

I suddenly encountered an error where SESSIONS could no longer be written to disk:

[Mon Apr 19 19:58:32 2010] [warn] mod_fcgid: stderr: PHP Warning: Unknown: open(/var/www/clients/client1/web1/tmp/sess_8e12742b62aa68a3f9476ec80222bbfb, O_RDWR) failed: No space left on device (28) in Unknown on line 0

[Mon Apr 19 19:58:32 2010] [warn] mod_fcgid: stderr: PHP Warning: Unknown: Failed to write session data (files). Please verify that the current setting of session.save_path is correct (/var/www/clients/client1/web1/tmp) in Unknown on line 0

I ran:

$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/md0              457G  126G  308G  29% /
tmpfs                 1.8G     0  1.8G   0% /lib/init/rw
udev                   10M  664K  9.4M   7% /dev
tmpfs                 1.8G     0  1.8G   0% /dev/shm

But as you can see, the disk isn't full.

So I had a look in the syslog which says the following 20 times per second:

kernel: [19570794.361241] EXT3-fs warning (device md0): ext3_dx_add_entry: Directory index full!

This led me thinking to a full folder, obviously, but since my web folder only has 60k files (having counted them), I guessed it was the tmp folder (the local one, for this instance of php) that messed things up.

Some commands I ran:

$ sudo ls sess_a* | xargs rm -f bash: /usr/bin/sudo: Argument list too long

find . -exec rm {} \; rm: cannot remove directory '.' find: cannot fork: Cannot allocate memory

I'm running Debian Lenny, php5, ISPConfig, SuEXEC and Fast-CGI.

Kyle Brandt
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Jonatan Littke
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3 Answers3

1

find /tmp -name "sess_*" -exec rm {} \;

solefald
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I'm using this method to delete 2.3 million - looks like it will be finished in about 10-15 minutes

http://www.binarysludge.com/2012/01/01/how-to-delete-millions-of-files-linux/

Brian Cohen
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First of all, the errors about not being able to write to

/var/www/clients/client1/web1/tmp/

doesn't mean that it is this directory that has all the files, just that it is there it's trying to write when it logs the error. But you have located the files, and are about to remove them.

  • stop the web server (if possible) to prevent creation of more, and stop spewing error messages
  • clean up
  • restart web server
  • observe if it starts again

For the cleanup step, assuming the files to clean are in /var/www/clients/client1/web1/tmp, first become the same effective user as the one creating the session files (probably one of apache or httpd or www-data), then:

  • cd /var/www/clients/client1/web1/tmp
  • ls -f | grep ^sess_ | xargs rm -f
MattBianco
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