In Linux, on an extremely long running vim session, calls to system() fail with E484 “can't open file /tmp/<tempfile>”

Question

I've noticed this only on long running vims in my Linux server. I've narrowed down the E484s to lines of my vimscript that call system.

I just wonder if there is a way to deal with this because so far i have just been closing and restarting vim if this happens. But since the problem is so specific, it would be nice if it could be addressed so i can continue to use the running instance.

It's tricky to test and iterate on this because it takes at least 3 weeks before a vim instance gets into this state.

Answer 1

This happens when some system cron job cleans out "unused" files from /tmp. The solutions are:

1. Find that cron job and stop it from rm'ing your Vim /tmp files.

2. Recreate Vim's temporary directory.

Given the temporary directory name from the error message, you can recreate the directory manually with "!mkdir <dirname>", or you can use this command which you can put in your ~/.vimrc:

command! Mktmpdir call mkdir(fnamemodify(tempname(),":p:h"),"",0700)

That command was contributed to the vim_use list by Ben Schmidt.