Thanks to all who responded, including a few who responded offlist. I haven't really resolved the problem, but I have learned a few things that I'll try to summarize in this. Well, actually, Sven has done a pretty good job--I might add a few comments.
On Saturday 11 February 2012 11:28:21 am Sven Joachim wrote: > On 2012-02-11 15:33 +0100, Randy Kramer wrote: > > So, my questions: > > * is that possible (that Flash or Iceweasel are using unnamed inodes > > to create invisible files on /tmp) > > Yes. Well, the file needs to be given a name initially, but the name > can be removed by calling unlink(2) after it has been opened. I'm now sure that is what is happening--Flash is creating a cached file (associated with the URL of a video) on /tmp, and then immediately unlinking the file. I assume it is sort of a piracy prevention measure, but then I don't understand why they put another copy of the cached file in the iceweasel / firefox cache on ~. But, who am I to guess why they did that, or maybe that is something that iceweasel does and Flash can't prevent (easily)? > > * if so, are there some tools I can use to find those files > > Yes, lsof is helpful. lsof sounded like a good idea, but doesn't actually find the files. I guess it would find the files before the unlink occurred. > > and delete them > > to provide more space on /tmp (to free up the frozen videos) > > No, as long the browser keeps the file open, it is not possible to free > the space occupied by it. Restart Iceweasel to achieve that. Yup, there seem to be only two ways to free up that space on /tmp: close the tab displaying the video (with or without viewing it to the end), or close iceweasel. For now, what I'm doing if I plan to open a lot of tabs with videos is to run df /tmp regularly, and, if I approach 100% usage, I'll take steps to close some tabs. One of the off list responses to my question referred me to: http://www.linuxondesktop.in/2011/03/how-to-download-flash-files-no-flash.html which touches on the subject and includes a bash script named findflash. That didn't work directly, but after deconstructing it to understand how it should work (and why it didn't), I used some of the things I learned from it to dig deeper into the problem. That is what has pretty much convinced me that I'm not going to find an easy solution, although I might explore some links that talk about undeleting files, because the problem sort of comes down to that--I'm guessing that if I learned the right things about undeleting files, I might also learn how to put a name on an unlinked file that hasn't yet been deleted (because the tab containing the video is still open), and then using that name really delete--oops, wait, that won't work either, because the open tab will maintain a link to that file and presumably prevent me from deleting it. (Sorry, that's a pretty convoluted and not easy to understand paragraph. I should rewrite it, but not today.) So, I'll probably just stick with monitoring the space free / used on /tmp, and close tabs when necessary to avoid 100% usage. Thanks! Randy Kramer -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected] Archive: http://lists.debian.org/[email protected]
