Re: [gentoo-user] unix philosophy question for old farts: the original purpose for /tmp ?

[Gregory Woodbury]

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
redwolfe@×××××.com

On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 7:41 PM, Andreas K. Huettel
<dilfridge@g.o> 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
redwolfe@×××××.com