The tmpreaper utility will clean out your temporary file directories by recursively removing files that haven’t been accessed in some amount of time. You can configure exclusions and it will not dive into symlinks, or remove symlinks, sockets, FIFOs, or special files unless specifically told to.

At least some versions of Ubuntu, and possibly Debian, do not install tmpreaper by default. I assume that is in accordance with the “principle of least surprise” but this policy may bother system administrators familiar with Red Hat or other systems where /tmp is automatically cleaned out by default.

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