Edouard Klein <edouardklein(a)gmail.com> wrote: From the phraseology in the paper ("The system will remove ....") it sounds to me like it was not a csh feature at all, but rather that the UCB systems had a cron job to run something like find / -name '#*' -mtime +7 -exec rm {} \; It's easy enough to research this in the archives, if you have the energy. :-) HTH, Arnold

Indeed - that's how UCB Systems worked. /tmp was a small scratch disk and anything there was suspect. Scratch files were not a CShell feature, they were a UNIX feature, very much needed on the 16-bit address PDP-11 where it was developed. The idea originally became popular with Dennis's C Compiler which used it for the intermediate files between the passes on the PDP-11. On a large public system like a University, /tmp would fill with cruft. It was traditionally removed on reboot. But that was not good enough for production systems that did not reboot. My memory is that there was a script that was similar to what Aharon suggested that ran in the early hours of the day, although before it ran it created a time_stamp_file with touch(1) set to be 6 hours previous so the script let anything under 6 hours survive using a negation on the -newer time_stamp_file clause. Clem On Wed, Jun 5, 2019 at 8:51 AM <arnold(a)skeeve.com> wrote: