Moving from Solaris to Linux has been enriching, but not without subtle differences. One of many was the need for older SLES servers to clear out /tmp and /var/tmp. I started with the standard Solaris cron jobs:

/usr/bin/find /tmp/* -mount -depth -mtime +30 -a -exec rm -rf {} \; > /dev/null 2>&1
/usr/bin/find /var/tmp/* -mount -depth -mtime +30 -a -exec rm -rf {} \; > /dev/null 2>&1

In spite of how active some of these servers are, if /tmp or /var/tmp are empty, the above commands return a value of 1 instead of 0, thus resulting in a nice email that cron failed. Removing the asterisk was an easy way to fix this, however that posed the problem of deleting /tmp or /var/tmp itself if there was no activity on the server for 30 days. Unlikely, but possible. Rather than touching a file before the find commands (thus moving mtime to current), I opted to exclude directories and only remove files (adding the -type f option). Even though directories can still exist, they take up very little space and will likely get cleaned up on a reboot at some point. This was a happy medium. My script now looks like this:

/usr/bin/find /tmp/ -type f -mount -depth -mtime +30 -a -exec rm -rf {} \; > /dev/null 2>&1
/usr/bin/find /var/tmp/ -type f -mount -depth -mtime +30 -a -exec rm -rf {} \; > /dev/null 2>&1