For the penguinistas in here, it appears that wpa supplicant is writing 0
byte files to /tmp. I've seen Google references to these as "sockets".
Anyone know if this is normal behaviour for this program? Can these be
deleted safely? Curiously even though lilo is configured to clean /tmp at
every boot, these zero byte files are not deleted. Any thoughts?

On Mar 21, 9:53 am, "mr.b" <m...@b.com> wrote:
> For the penguinistas in here, it appears that wpa supplicant is writing 0
> byte files to /tmp. I've seen Google references to these as "sockets".
> Anyone know if this is normal behaviour for this program? Can these be
> deleted safely? Curiously even though lilo is configured to clean /tmp at
> every boot, these zero byte files are not deleted. Any thoughts?

I'm not running wpa_supplicant - but the next question would be "what
type of zero byte files are they?"

as in '$ ls -l /tmp/ctrl*" and see whether they are regular files,
sockets, etc.

On Thu, 22 Mar 2007 12:15:20 -0700, alisonken1 wrote:

> I'm not running wpa_supplicant - but the next question would be "what type
> of zero byte files are they?"
>
> as in '$ ls -l /tmp/ctrl*" and see whether they are regular files,
> sockets, etc.

for example:

ls -l /tmp/wpa* gives

srwxr-xr-x 1 root root 0 Apr 18 2006 wpa_ctrl_5868-0=

among many others

On Mar 22, 12:45 pm, "mr.b" <m...@b.com> wrote:
<snip>
>
> ls -l /tmp/wpa* gives
>
> srwxr-xr-x 1 root root 0 Apr 18 2006 wpa_ctrl_5868-0=

The first character (s) is telling you that the file is actually a
socket. Sockets are used to connect I/O between different programs.

Example:

crw-rw---- 1 root tty 4, 64 2007-03-19 00L16 /dev/tts/0

The first character (c) indicates it's a character device file entry
(typically used for serial communications for /dev/ttyS0 - which is
symlinked to /dev/tts/0)

So - this file entry is just a socket to allow different programs to
talk to each other without having to go through the hoops of trying to
program internal communications between programs via kernel calls and
such.

Since I don't have a wireless setup on my linux box, I can't tell you
if they are absolutely required, but it looks like your wireless setup
is using sockets to communicate between the different modules.