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On 12/15/2014 11:17 PM, Alan McKinnon wrote: |
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> On 16/12/2014 02:17, walt wrote: |
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>> I confess I've never thought much about why /tmp exists, but today I was |
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>> inconvenienced when an end-user utility (uudeview) ran out of space on /tmp |
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>> while doing an ordinary end-user task processing very large end-user files. |
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>> |
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>> Why is an end-user program using a "system" directory like /tmp in the first |
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>> place? |
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>> |
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>> I suspect that the need for /tmp is now gone, but I'm prepared to be wrong :) |
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>> |
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>> |
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>> |
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> |
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> |
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> /tmp was always intended to be used exactly the way you are using it: |
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> |
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> yes, it is a "system directory" because it's located in / but you have |
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> permissions to use it. The mode is 1777 so everyone can |
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> read/write/execute the contents but it's also sticky (the 1) so only you |
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> can delete what you put there. It's a general-use scratch pad area that |
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> everyone can use safely, unfortunately in these days of huge cheap disks |
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> some apps abuse it by writing gigantic files there and you run out of space. |
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> |
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> How have you set /tmp up? Is it on-disk or a tmpfs? You might need to |
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> make it bigger. |
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systemd puts /tmp on a tmpfs by default, and this ancient machine has a mere |
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4GB of ram :) I didn't know about the TMPDIR environment (thanks, redwolfe) |
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so I worked around the problem by rebooting with openrc, which uses my original |
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/tmp on the hard drive. (Exactly the excuse I need to buy more RAM :) |
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> /tmp is still very much in use and very much needed, it isn't going |
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> anywhere soon. The FHS has something interesting to say about /tmp, |
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> along the lines of: |
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> |
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> "A general use scratch pad area where files written are not expected to |
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> survive successive invocations of the program that wrote them". That's |
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> interesting as it means the sysadmin can delete everything in /tmp at |
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> any time for any reason, |
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bofh can delete them for no reason at all while you're still using them :) |
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> and all apps will continue to work just fine as |
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> if they had not been deleted at all :-) |
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