uhhh... suse problems !! (and solutions :d)

Yesterday was an eventful day for me. Finally I was prepared to completely dump windows and switch over to linux. As a part of that endeavour, downloaded w32 codecs and got video and all other workable things working on my Suse 9.3 ... and in the excitement of videos running flawlessly on my distro (which is outdated and antic :D), tried running as many as 5 movies on all possible video players !!

Today, I would quit Windows. Little did I know what Linux had in store for me :(
(Btw... this has forced me rethink the "completely" part of dumping windows... I'd rather use Windows to troubleshoot linux when it crashes :D... a worthy use for Windows :) )

The thing is, I have a 10G partition dedicated to Linux, of which only about 5G is currently in use. But, today while I was browsing the internet, a pop-up message showed up saying I was low on disk space and within minutes, all applications ceased and failed to load when I tried to restart them. I looked around for a while, then decided to reboot (the windows way :D)... but, when I rebooted, Suse tells me that I can't even log in because the disk is 100% full !!... Not a byte to spare for the user of the system to log in!!... (may be because XWindows system requires some disk space??) whats suse goin to do without ME :D

Anyways, so here's where windows comes in, a simple google search suggested that I use the du command to check the disk usage and then decide on the further action.
So, booted Linux in failsafe mode, and entered du :
The problem was : the temporary folder (/tmp) was hogging half of the disk with a whopping 4.8G !!

and why's that ??.... well .. apparently when I played the movies yesterday (which were stored on the windows drive), what linux did in the background was :
it copied the movie, realtime, onto the linux /tmp folder and then played the movie. i.e. the entire movie was being copied onto my linux drive in the background. And the responsible application didn't even delete it from the temp folder!! I am still not able to pinpoint whether the erring app is kaffeine, VLC or Mplayer... but once I do, its going to get a beating of a lifetime :D

So, solution ?? ....
$ rm -rv /tmp
(del contents on tmp folder)