On Wed, 19 Jun 2024 10:48:39 +1200, Peter Reutemann wrote:

Saw this on my mastodon feed:

'TIL (thankfully second hand) that running "systemd-tmpfiles --purge" will delete /home in systemd 256 [1]. Apparently if you think linux is mainly for running cloud services, this seems reasonable to you. Or something.

[1] tested with systemd-tmpfiles --dry-run --purge on debian. I guess it _could_ be a Debian addition, but I'm guessing not.'

-- source: https://mathstodon.xyz/@bremner/112615591101488528

Here’s the man page <https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd-tmpfiles.html>. This is slightly different from the one on my Debian Unstable system. Under the --purge option, the online version says If this switch is used at least one tmpfiles.d/ file (or - for standard input) must be specified on the command line or the invocation will be refused, for safety reasons ... and furthermore Warning! This is is usually not the command you want! In most cases --remove is what you are looking for. So clearly the command given above isn’t going to work with this version. For comparison, the systemd-tmpfiles man page on my system has basically this to say about --purge: If this option is passed, all files and directories created by a tmpfiles.d/ entry will be deleted. The systemd package on my system has version “256~rc3-2”, whereas the GitHub page shows the latest release as “256.1”. So it looks like the issue has already been identified and fixed.