.viminf?.tmp Files

I’m a long-term user of members of the vi family of text editors. I believe I discovered it in maybe 1988, when SGI loaned my employers an IRIX graphics workstation.

The graphics workstation mainly served to run “dogfight”, the flight simulator that came with IRIX installs.

Now, 38 years later, I had a problem with a distant descendant of vi, vim

A few days ago, vim started to misbehave. Every time I quit vim (by clever use of :q! or :qa! or the neologism :x), I got two esoteric error messages:

The messages read:

E929: Too many viminfo temp files, like /home/bediger/.viminfa.tmp!
E138: Can't write viminfo file /home/bediger/.viminfa.tmp!

I’ve never previously seen this message.

If I do something like ls -l $HOME/.viminf* I see 27 files:

-rw------- bediger/bediger 46627 2026-03-15 18:45 .viminfo
-rw------- bediger/bediger   0 2026-03-15 21:55 .viminfa.tmp
-rw------- bediger/bediger   0 2026-02-28 22:16 .viminfb.tmp
-rw------- bediger/bediger   0 2026-02-13 22:38 .viminfc.tmp
-rw------- bediger/bediger   0 2026-01-17 18:20 .viminfd.tmp
-rw------- bediger/bediger 50104 2026-02-13 22:38 .viminfe.tmp
-rw------- bediger/bediger     0 2026-01-17 18:20 .viminff.tmp
-rw------- bediger/bediger     0 2026-01-11 18:30 .viminfg.tmp
-rw------- bediger/bediger     0 2025-09-24 21:07 .viminfh.tmp
-rw------- bediger/bediger     0 2025-08-25 14:52 .viminfi.tmp
-rw------- bediger/bediger     0 2025-09-23 09:19 .viminfj.tmp
-rw------- bediger/bediger     0 2025-08-03 19:08 .viminfk.tmp
-rw------- bediger/bediger     0 2025-07-04 12:56 .viminfl.tmp
-rw------- bediger/bediger     0 2025-05-18 14:50 .viminfm.tmp
-rw------- bediger/bediger     0 2025-03-22 16:41 .viminfn.tmp
-rw------- bediger/bediger     0 2021-08-22 08:36 .viminfo.tmp
-rw------- bediger/bediger     0 2025-01-28 23:20 .viminfp.tmp
-rw------- bediger/bediger     0 2025-01-08 08:14 .viminfq.tmp
-rw------- bediger/bediger  8192 2024-12-26 21:43 .viminfr.tmp
-rw------- bediger/bediger 36864 2024-12-05 21:01 .viminfs.tmp
-rw------- bediger/bediger 12288 2024-12-05 21:01 .viminft.tmp
-rw------- bediger/bediger 24576 2024-12-05 21:01 .viminfu.tmp
-rw------- bediger/bediger 16384 2024-12-05 21:01 .viminfv.tmp
-rw------- bediger/bediger     0 2021-11-28 15:05 .viminfw.tmp
-rw------- bediger/bediger 24576 2024-11-09 17:12 .viminfx.tmp
-rw------- bediger/bediger     0 2021-11-12 12:17 .viminfy.tmp
-rw------- bediger/bediger     0 2021-08-22 08:36 .viminfz.tmp

That’s a weird date range. According to /var/log/pacman.log, I first ran pacman -Syu at 2021-08-01T17:49:02+0000. The actual command was pacman -r /mnt -Sy --cachedir=/mnt/var/cache/pacman/pkg --noconfirm base linux linux-firmware, which was part of the Arch Linux install. I was installing packages to my laptop’s SSD. There’s nearly a 3 year gap between .viminfw.tmp and .viminfx.tmp

The dates do not correspond closely with boots. I have no idea why vim would leave these files behind.

The solution is something like:

$ cd
$ rm .viminfo?.tmp

You should really verify how .viminfo?.tmp expands before executing the rm.