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I've noticed that empty directories get deleted from /var/run/ on reboot. I'm wondering if that's something Ubuntu does or something that I have installed.

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/var/run is a symlink on /run and that's just a tmpfs mount created on boot. Everything in it is stored in RAM and dies at reboot.

So things are already slightly different. I can't see anything about tmpfs being set up to autoclean other than on reboots though and I've just run through this:

sudo mkdir /run/pie
sudo touch /run/pie/pies
sudo rm /run/pie/pies
ls # /run/pie/ still exists, empty

So it might be just you - or it might be a cleanup daemon. I've had a quick search through /etc but can't find anything. You might have more luck: sudo grep -R 'tmpfs' /etc/

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  • If it's tmpfs, it should get erased every time you turn off power, no?
    – m33lky
    Dec 21, 2011 at 1:23
  • Yes, that's how /var/run gets cleaned every time to answer my own question.
    – m33lky
    Dec 21, 2011 at 18:18
  • I actually answered that in the second sentence :P Edit: I see the confusion. I'm operating under the assumption you're seeing things disappear on a live system without restarting. If you're just rebooting and noticing things are gone, then yes, that's just the nature of tmpfs.
    – Oli ♦
    Dec 21, 2011 at 19:01

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