On 16/12/2014 02:17, walt 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 :) > > >
/tmp was always intended to be used exactly the way you are using it: yes, it is a "system directory" because it's located in / but you have permissions to use it. The mode is 1777 so everyone can read/write/execute the contents but it's also sticky (the 1) so only you can delete what you put there. It's a general-use scratch pad area that everyone can use safely, unfortunately in these days of huge cheap disks some apps abuse it by writing gigantic files there and you run out of space. How have you set /tmp up? Is it on-disk or a tmpfs? You migght need to make it bigger. /tmp is still very much in use and very much needed, it isn't going anywhere soon. The FHS has something interesting to say about /tmp, along the lines of: "A general use scratch pad area where files written are not expected to survive successive invocations of the program that wrote them". That's interesting as it means the sysadmin can delete everything in /tmp at any time for any reason, and all apps will continue to work just fine as if they had not been deleted at all :-) -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
