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 …