On Tue, Dec 11, 2007 at 07:49:39PM +0530, murageshgouda.patil at wipro.com wrote: > It's the basic question; Solaris uses /var/tmp/ directory within write > system call for storing temporary data. > > What the basic idea of having "/var/tmp/" directory? > And what is the difference between /var/tmp and /tmp directory?
Not sure what you mean by the write system call using /var/tmp/, but you can figure out the main difference between /var/tmp and /tmp by checking their filesystem types. $ df -h /tmp /var/tmp Filesystem size used avail capacity Mounted on swap 1.2G 11M 1.2G 1% /tmp /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s3 4.8G 4.2G 613M 88% / As you can see from the output above, /var/tmp is a directory in the root filesystem, while /tmp is mounted on swap. Essentially, /tmp is a tmpfs filesystem and uses up your system's swap space. The advantage is that it is much faster. The disadvantage -- putting too much stuff in /tmp eats up your virtual memory. Venky.
