[gentoo-user] unix philosophy question for old farts: the original purpose for /tmp ?
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 :)
Re: [gentoo-user] unix philosophy question for old farts: the original purpose for /tmp ?
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
Re: [gentoo-user] unix philosophy question for old farts: the original purpose for /tmp ?
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 redwo...@gmail.com On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 7:41 PM, Andreas K. Huettel dilfri...@gentoo.org 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 redwo...@gmail.com
Re: [gentoo-user] unix philosophy question for old farts: the original purpose for /tmp ?
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
