Why does /var/lock/tt-rss keep being deleted after reboot?

Question

I use sudo mkdir /var/lock/tt-rss/ to create this folder which a program called tiny rss needs. But if I reboot Ubuntu, the lock and tt-rss folders no longer exist. It's as if Ubuntu is treating them like temp folders.

I need /var/lock/tt-rss/ to be a permanent folder. How can I make it stay? I could probably do a startup entry, but that seems more of a workaround than a fix.

Answer 1

Since Oneiric, /var/lock is a symlink to /run/lock:

$ ls -ld /var/lock
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Jan 15 18:30 /var/lock -> /run/lock

/run and /run/lock are tmpfs filesystems:

$ mount | grep /run
tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,size=10%,mode=0755)
none on /run/lock type tmpfs (rw,noexec,nosuid,nodev,size=5242880)

In other words, your files are not stored on your root filesystem, but are lost at every reboot by design.

Files in /{var,run}/lock are not meant to be long-term storage locations. To solve your problem, you can create a script that creates /var/lock/tt-rss/ at every boot, and maybe that backups its content at every shutdown (depending on your needs). However this probably deserves an another question.