The redoubtable Era Eriksson wrote,
| My recommendation would be to instead simply save to a directory, and
| take care of the pruning of old backups via a cron job or something.
[When Era splits an infinitive, he keeps piling on the adverbs until he's
positive that it will stay split.]
There are two different models here: to keep messages until they reach a
given age, or to keep a certain static number of the most recent messages.
The backup recipe under discussion follows the latter; Era's alternative
recommendations all go with the former. Each has its pluses and minuses.
| On the other hand, some admins get nervous when users start taking
| advantage of /tmp too much, because various more or less important
| things will stop working if you manage to fill up /tmp. Perhaps there
| is a /scratch or /var/tmp or something you should be using instead.
One site I used to use reminded us in /etc/motd at every logon to store our
temporary files /var/tmp so that system utilities' temporary files and such
would not be crowded out of /tmp. On other systems, /tmp and /var/tmp were
on the same device, or /tmp was even a symlink to /var/tmp, so it made no
difference.