[ic] catalog tmp files - periodically purging these files

[John1]

I was doing some housekeeping the other day and decided to delete the 
temporary files in the catalog/my_catalog/tmp directory.

To my surprise it freed up about 2GB of disk space!

As far as I am aware, all of these files were no bigger than about 4K, so 
2GB makes for a lot of temporary files!

So I guess Interchange never trims the contents of this tmp directory. 
Should it be?  Can I safely do this through a cron job, and if so any 
suggestions on a criteria for the trimming, or better still an example 
script?

BTW, what are all these files - from looking at the contents in a text 
editor it looks like they have  something to do with the Interchange search 
(i.e. Scan) routine?

Please can anyone cast any light on this for me.  Thanks