[steve626]

[FYI, I posted this question on Macfixit but no one answered so far.]

I noticed on two systems, one running 10.2.8 and the other running 10.3.9, that there are many apparently "temporary" files in this folder, private/var/tmp -- this is an invisible folder and can best be viewed by the "go to folder" menu command or thru terminal with sudo. Many of these files seem to have been created a long time ago and have not been modifed. I am not inclined to do anything about it, but am wondering if this is normal. Both computers have the daily, weekly, monthly cron maintenance scripts run.

Another thing I noticed is that the "daily.out" log (in private/var/log) of the maintenance script seems to append each daily log to the existing daily.out file so it grows and grows. One of my computers is a 2001 iMac so that file is now a few megabytes.

Both of these computers are very stable (never had a kernel panic ...) so I don't really plan to do anything. Maybe this is "normal" for BSD unix Macs. If these ".out" files are deleted, will they get recreated? I recall hearing somewhere about extra tmp files being created by a version of Norton AntiVirus and that they could be deleted, but I am loathe to touch anything in these invisible directories.

[Detrius]

temp files are just that--temporary. Any program that creates tmp files should clean up after itself. You can safely delete everything in the tmp directory. However, some files may be used by currently running applications. In theory, you would do this in single user mode and then reboot.

Keep in mind though that just because a file hasn't been modified doesn't necessarily mean it hasn't been used.