GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 167030
/tmp not cleaned up, which causes bad results if user's UID changes
Last modified: 2008-05-08 21:50:01 UTC
Steps to reproduce: 1. create user test 2. login with X in GNOME 3. logout 4. change UID for the user 5. change user's directory ownership to match new UID 6. login with X in GNOME 7. Terrible things happen Stack trace: This is caused by not cleaning the /tmp directory. When using GNOME the following files/directories are created: drwx------ 3 olaf users 17 Feb 11 09:33 gconfd-olaf srwxr-xr-x 1 olaf users 0 Feb 11 09:33 mapping-olaf drwx------ 2 olaf users 652 Feb 11 09:40 orbit-olaf After finishing GNOME the created files/directories should be removed. The second problem is that the errors produced by GNOME in this case are not user friendly, you get many dialog boxes but no one with the exact cause. Other information:
This is pretty ugly, I'll grant, but the nasty result is caused by a corner case, right? retitling to make slightly more accurate.
This is probably linked to bug 141138
Consider this: while (true); do touch /tmp/gconfd-$(tail -n1 /etc/passwd |awk -F: '{print $1}'); done It could render Gnome unusable for any newly created users. Using a name /tmp/gconf-username is bad idea at all. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=219279
Is this error even present on unix (solaris 10) ?
Don't see how this would be any different on Solaris than on Linux.
I think Solaris uses a ramfs for /tmp so it's blown away at boot up (could be wrong).
See attachment 110602 [details] [review] from bug 507310 for a potential solution to this.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 141138 ***