Initially the bug report was shot down by systemd developer Luca Boccassi of Microsoft with:
So an option that is literally documented as saying “all files and directories created by a tmpfiles.d/ entry will be deleted”, that you knew nothing about, sounded like a “good idea”? Did you even go and look what tmpfiles.d entries you had beforehand?
Maybe don’t just run random commands that you know nothing about, while ignoring what the documentation tells you? Just a thought eh"
Good devs, good product, I’m really excited about our shitty, shitty future.
I unfortunately updated already and they seem to have added documentation into
man systemd-tmpfilesalready. Here is the snippet that is relevant:--purge If this option is passed, all files and directories marked for creation by the tmpfiles.d/ files specified on the command line will be deleted. Specifically, this acts on all files and directories marked with f, F, d, D, v, q, Q, p, L, c, b, C, w, e. If this switch is used at least one tmpfiles.d/ file (or - for standard input) must be specified on the command line or the invocation will be refused, for safety reasons (as otherwise much of the installed system files might be removed). The primary usecase for this option is to automatically remove files and directories that originally have been created on behalf of an installed packaged at package removal time. It is recommended to first run this command in combination with --dry-run (see below) to verify which files and directories will be deleted. Warning! This is is usually not the command you want! In most cases --remove is what you are looking for. Added in version 256.Did you update to 256.1? On Poettering’s recommendation, they made it require a config.