Just recently I seem to have noticed an increased number of mysterious crashes and terminations of applications. This is generally on brand new systems that I’m setting up, or on existing systems where I’m setting up a new or duplicate account. Initially everything is fine, but then all of a sudden as I start syncing over my files, shell profile and so on applications will stop working. I’ve experienced it in MySQL, and more recently when starting up Gnome on Solaris 10 9/07. Sometimes the problem is obvious, other times it takes me a while to realize what is happening and causing the problem. But in all cases it’s the same problem – my TMPDIR environment variable points to a directory that doesn't exist. That's because for historical reasons (mostly related to HP-UX, bad permissions and global tmp directories) I've always set TMPDIR to a directory within my home directory. It's just a one of those things I've had in my bash profile for as long as I can remember. Probably 12 years or more at least. This can be counterproductive on some systems - on Solaris for example the main /tmp directory is actually mounted on the swap space, which means that RAM will be used if it’s available, which can make a big difference during compilation. But any setting is counterproductive if you point to a directory that doesn’t exist and then have an application that tries to create a temporary file, fails, and then never prints out a useful trace of why it had a problem (yes, I mean you Gnome!). I’ve just reset my TMPDIR in .bash_vars to read:

case $OSTYPE in (solaris*) export set TMPDIR=/tmp/mc;mkdir -m 0700 -p $TMPDIR ;; (*) export set TMPDIR=~/tmp;mkdir -m 0700 -p $TMPDIR ;;esac

Now I explicitly create a directory in a suitable location during startup, so I shouldn’t experience those crashes anymore.