As I recall, tmp was often a small, fast disk drive, compared to the slow lumbering washing machines that most data resided on. Several sites I recall had a couple of head per track drives; one would be for the swap partitions and the other was for temporary stuff that was being worked on. After the edits or whatever were done, the user or the system would move the stuff off of /tmp and back to the main disks. Because users sometimes forgot to remove their stuff from tmp, various utilities (such as tmpwatch) would reap old files on a regular basis. One consultant I knew didn't trust UNIX because he put files in /tmp and was astonished when they were not there several days later.
These days it is more common to have /tmp be reserved for smaller system stuff, and to use /usr/tmp or /var/tmp for lager user files. Admins can set the environment variable TMP or TMPDIR in the login profiles if necessary. It hangs on because too many programs and scripts assume it is available. -- Old time *nix fart. G.Wolfe Woodbury redwo...@gmail.com On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 7:41 PM, Andreas K. Huettel <dilfri...@gentoo.org> wrote: >> I confess I've never thought much about why /tmp exists, but today I was >> inconvenienced when an end-user utility (uudeview) ran out of space on /tmp >> while doing an ordinary end-user task processing very large end-user files. >> >> Why is an end-user program using a "system" directory like /tmp in the first >> place? >> >> I suspect that the need for /tmp is now gone, but I'm prepared to be wrong >> :) > > Because /home may be on a NFS mount, with slow access and a disk usage quota. > :) > > -- > Andreas K. Huettel > Gentoo Linux developer > kde, council > > -- -- G.Wolfe Woodbury redwo...@gmail.com
