/var/spool/sockets/ICE

[Brian Taylor]

Hey all,

What is this directory? And it is safe to clean it out? I have about 1500 files in there and it is messing with a username migration.

Thanks much!

[Stefan Farrelly]

Theyre all to do with CDE (dtsession processes). You can clean em out anytime, as long as the process they refer to isnt running anymore. All the files are PIDs - check first the process isnt running anymore then rm them.

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

They are ICE (Inter-Client Exchange) pipes used by CDE sessions in X windows subsystem. If you are not using CDE emulation on this server, you can simply clean them up. Else write a small script to see if each of the pid is active and delete if not.

-Sri

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

THe vast majority of those are defunct CDE processes. I would do something like this:

#!/usr/bin/sh
cd /var/spool/sockets/ICE
ls | while read X
do
kill -0 ${X} > /dev/null
STAT=$?
if [ ${STAT} -ne 0 ]
then
rm ${X}
fi
done


Kill -0 simply tests if the process is active. It returns a zero result if so; non-zero otherwise and the file is safe to be deleted.

Clay

[Brian Taylor]

Thanks all, you rock!