Been using the new launcher for a few months. I can’t remember how big the folder was the first time I deleted it, but the launcher creates a SquirrelTemp folder. It puts things in there. It never deletes them.
I just removed another ~250gigs of garbage.
Previously I deleted it and it was almost 600gigs of garbage.
This gets created upon launch of the launcher. Just tried it fresh after deleting all files… a single launch - 350Megs. tempa, tempb, tempc.
Please stop abusing the SSDs. If we can’t get away from making the files in the first place, at least delete them upon closing.
– Workaround –
On linux I was able to set the SquirrelTemp folder itself to owner root and group root. Seems to have stopped the launcher from putting stuff in there. Launcher still seems to function ok. YMMV
Ran into this today when the whole root suddenly was “full”. Drilled down to \SquirrelTemp and its many, many temp folders.
Got my drive back and gave my user “List only” permissions for \SquirrelTemp. That works fine as well.
Same problem is here.
I’m not sure about it’s important or not but the SquirrelTemp folder has not been re-created since I gave up multiboxing for a while.
Linux Mint 21.3, Steam Proton Experimental.
Same problem here, over 500GB in SquirrelTemp which completely filled up my drive. I deleted the folder, and now EVE won’t start. This is on Linux via Steam.
Yeah, CCP, same here - ~320GB. This really sucks, the disk size on local is NOT unlimited and making a product that is unable to manage it’s cache is really lame.
There is also a very nasty way how this can go wrong.
If there is not enough space on disk and launcher tries to update itself. It does that by populating new folder named “app-[version]” in the game folder. But the thing is that it does not calculate the space that is needed, nor is unable to revert changes in case it is unable to download files due to full disk.
In my case the launcher just left empty binary eve-online.exe there and crashed so when I run the game via steam again, it tried to execute that empty binary and crashed.
The resolution is to just delete the entire folder “app-[version]” that is corrupted.
This is a steam problem. It is not happening for me on wine. It was happening when the installer was new and the fix for wine is to install “msdelta” via winetricks.
I don’t know if you can do similar for steam or if valve has to fix this.
I also don’t use Steam at all, but I did find the “SquirrelTemp” folder in my system. This folder and its contents are created by the launcher and not by Steam. While I didn’t find hundred of GBs inside my folder, there was 1 GB in total, which is too much temp garbage for my tastes. I wonder if my folder was smaller because, I don’t play Vanguard or because I don’t play EVE each and every day. I am very casual and seldom find time to play often.
Note for developers: Linux uses /tmp and /var/tmp at the root level for temporary files. The /tmp folder is used to store the short-lived temporary files. The /var/tmp folder is used to store long-lived temporary files. Today I found within “EVE/packages” another empty SquirrelTemp folder. This SquirrelTemp is clearly your puppy, if you could explain why we need this, I will be happy to listen to reason.
Additional Info: This isn’t unique to Linux either, I popped over to a Windows machine to look. C:\Users<user name>\AppData\Local\SquirrelTemp is here too. Properties read it at 1.08 GB on this system. I don’t know if there are any issues here with Windows users losing HD space but I would give this a long hard look.
You are describing it in a too general way. This can’t be described as “EVE on Linux”.
It is behaving different depending on how you run it, e.g. via Steam/Wine/Lutris and so on…
Also Squirrel is not owned by CCP, they are just using it: Squirrel · GitHub
There have been fixes to wine staging regarding the Squirrel Updater. And people found that you need to add “msdelta” to the wine configuration.
So this is fixed for wine staging.
Steam and Lutris have to fix it for them also or you have to use it differently. I do not know about those.
Meanwhile i guess you could clean up the temp directory manually if it needs to be.
Thanks for the source information. However it doesn’t alter the fact CCP are the ones using it. If it appears on their app across all OS, they need to take responsibility to update and notify Steam, Lutris, Microsoft, etc… Dumping this on the users, regardless of OS, is just thoughtless. It is one thing to say, you need to keep your graphics drivers updated for all your 3D games. It is quite different story to say, you need to keep on top of a program we chose to use for this one game.
Also I would hope they are working from their own current source and not this 11 year old code in the given link.
For myself, this folder hasn’t been accessed since Oct 2023 (one file relates to EVE Launcher and thats a log file), and other folders and files in this space haven’t been touched since 2022. This folder is used by more than just the EVE Launcher, so do check the folders to make sure you know it is in fact just the EVE Launcher and not something else on your machine.
Edit: just so its clear I’m on Windows 11 but this was raised to me from another user where they were seeing 150GB+ in this folder, trying to find out information from them as this looks to be different for different users, I’d expect a lot more forum posts about it if it was otherwise.
