Temp files being left over from PHP script on linux/apache

Question

I've just published a client website, it's primary purpose is distributing content from other sources, so it's regularly pulling in text, videos, images and audio from external feeds.

It also has an option for client to manually add content to be distributed.

Using PHP all this makes a fair bit of use of copy() to copy files from another server, move_uploaded_file() to copy manually uploaded files, and it also uses SimpleImage image manipulation class to make multiple copies, and crop etc..

Now to the problem: in amongst all of this, some temp files are not being deleted, it's locking up the server pretty quickly as when tmp is full it causes things like mysql errors and stops pages loading.

I've spent a lot of time googling which leads me to one thing: "temp files are deleted when the script is finished executing" - this is clearly not the case here.

Is there anything i can do to make sure any temporary files created by the scripts are deleted?

I've spoken to my server guy who suggested running a cron that will delete from it every 24 hours, i don't know whether this is a good solution but it's certainly not THE solution as i believe the files should be getting deleted? what could be a cause of stoping files from being deleted?

Answer 1

Regardless of anything else you come up with, the cron idea is still a good one, as you want to make sure that /tmp is getting cleaned up. You can have the cron job delete anything older than 24 hours, not delete everything every 24 hours, assuming this leaves enough space.

In terms of temp files deleting when the script is done. This only happens when tmpfile () is used to creat the temp file in the first place, as far as I know. So other files created in /tmp by other means (and there would be many other means) will not just go away because the script is done.