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17.6 Temporary directories for the server

While running, the CVS server creates temporary directories. They are named

cvs-servpid

where pid is the process identification number of the server. They are located in the directory specified by the ‘-T’ global option (see section A.4 Global options), the TMPDIR environment variable (see section C All environment variables which affect CVS), or, failing that, ‘/tmp’.

In most cases the server will remove the temporary directory when it is done, whether it finishes normally or abnormally. However, there are a few cases in which the server does not or cannot remove the temporary directory, for example:

• If the server aborts due to an internal server error, it may preserve the directory to aid in debugging
• If the server is killed in a way that it has no way of cleaning up (most notably, ‘kill -KILL’ on Unix).
• If the system shuts down without an orderly shutdown, which tells the server to clean up.

In cases such as this, you will need to manually remove the ‘cvs-servpid’ directories. As long as there is no server running with process identification number pid, it is safe to do so.