How to prevent Anydesk from freezing your browser when accessing /tmp

If you have AnyDesk installed, it creates numerous special files in the /tmp directory with prefixes like ad_mailbox and ad_connect_queue.

While AnyDesk is running, attempting to use a file upload button in a web browser and selecting a file from the /tmp directory can cause the browser to freeze. This issue seems to be related to the file picker struggling to fetch the /tmp directory’s contents.

Unfortunately, AnyDesk does not provide an option to change the temporary directory via its GUI settings or by setting a common environment variable like TMPDIR.

However, you can modify the /usr/bin/anydesk binary to point /tmp to a different location. Since the binary contains only one occurrence of /tmp, and the replacement must have the same number of characters, you can create an alternative directory (e.g., /any) and update the binary accordingly. This simple modification can help avoid these persistent issues.

sudo mkdir /any
sudo service anydesk stop
sudo perl -pi -e 's#/tmp#/any#g' /usr/bin/anydesk
sudo service anydesk start