On Friday, March 11, 2011 10:15:49 am Richard Troth wrote: > Mack said: > > You might also note that according to the FHS, /tmp is only supposed to > > be used by system processes. User-level processes are supposed to use > > /var/tmp. But of course, many programs violate that. Still, you might > > want to be cleaning up both directories. > > Yes ... keep an eye on /var/tmp also. > > I respect Ed, but I don't get this from my read of the FHS. In my > experience, it's the reverse: users typically are aware of /tmp and > use it and expect it to be available (without per-ID constraints as > suggested in the MVS-OE thread), while /var/tmp may actually be better > controlled (and less subject to clutter) and is lesser known to lay > users. My read of this part of the FHS fits. They recommend that > /var/tmp cleanup be less frequent than /tmp cleanup. (Content in > /var/tmp is explicitly expected to persist across reboots.)
Well, that was from memory, so I probably did get it wrong. I've always viewed /var/tmp as the place where you can mount a big filesystem for users to play in, because /tmp may well be on the root filesystem and you don't want that to fill up. Of course, Rick is right about users: they often write to /tmp anyway. So I tend to also mount a separate filesystem on /tmp. Personally, when I write a program or script that needs a temporary file, I put it in /var/tmp. When I want to temporarily save a file as a user, I put it in $HOME/tmp. That way I'm responsible for cleaning it up and it comes out of my quota. I'll bet no one else does that. :-) - MacK. ----- Edmund R. MacKenty Software Architect Rocket Software 275 Grove Street - Newton, MA 02466-2272 - USA Tel: +1.617.614.4321 Email: m...@rs.com Web: www.rocketsoftware.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@vm.marist.edu with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For more information on Linux on System z, visit http://wiki.linuxvm.org/