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I run two computers with Ubuntu 11.04 installed on one of them and Ubuntu 12.04 on another one. Both of them are connected to internet through one wireless router. I found that an identical set of files and folders have been plantet in .tmp folder on both of my computers despite the fact that they have different versions of OS running on them. The names of files sound very suspicious and they look like a spyware. Most of these files cannot be deleted as they are locked for the comp owner. Some of them can be removed, but replicate soon after that. I reformatted the hard drive of one of the comps and installed Ubunt 12.04.02 LTS freshly downloaded from the Ubunt site. I intentionally disconnected the comp from the internet during installation to see if these files appear again in the .tmp folder. And they did. Here the names of these files and folders:

/tmp/keyring-CTCn6F
/tmp/orbit-thierry
/tmp/pulse-2L9K88eMlGn7
/tmp/pulse-PKdhtXMmr18n
/tmp/pulse-qagOC5AMyLRa
/tmp/ssh-tJOQMucK1524
/tmp/virtual-thierry.ozVf7i
/tmp/unity_support_test.0

Please, advise if they are legitimate for the Ubuntu, which is hard to believe, and, if not, how to get rid of them?

Eric Carvalho
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Thierry
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1 Answers1

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The /tmp directory is the place where running applications may store temporary files.

/tmp
temporary data created by programs will most likely go in this directory. 40–100MB should usually be enough. Some applications — including archive manipulators, CD/DVD authoring tools, and multimedia software — may use /tmp to temporarily store image files. If you plan to use such applications, you should adjust the space available in /tmp accordingly. Ubuntu Help

For pulseaudio they mainly contain a PID and additional program settings which are stored to prevent running multiple instances. A desktop user will have no access to these, mainly because these directories and files were created by root at boot up

This directory should be cleaned after each reboot (see: How is the /tmp directory cleaned up?). You may see this from the time stamp which should be newer than your last reboot. Only if you had files older than your last boot you may be faced with an incomplete clean up of the /tmp directory. This which may come from personal settings or may be a bug.

Community
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Takkat
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