Just reading some documentation here... this may be obvious to some and not
others.
/tmp (swapspace mounted as /tmp) is not preserved across reboots. The file
names may be, but the data is not.
By "swapspace mounted as /tmp" I think Jill is referring to a system where
you have the same disk space available as both Unix file system space and swap
space. Swap space contains memory information for processes and it doesn't
make sense for any of it to be preserved across reboots as all the processes
have died and restarted. Disk space you do want preserved across reboots,
but many systems clean out /tmp on startup. This is one of those
behaviours that can change from Linux to Linux, let alone Linux to
commercial flavours of Unix.
Many systems, as part of their startup sequence, remove all files under /tmp.
Some do this recursively (removing any subdirectories as well), some just
remove the files directly underneath /tmp, some leave /tmp alone.
If you're booting such a machine and think to yourself "oh no- I need that
important file in /tmp" you can usually boot to single user mode and save
it from there before continuing to multi-user mode. Better still, get
into the habit of pronouncing tmp as 'temp' and thinking of /tmp as "temporary"
and don't put important files there. /tmp is mostly useful as a well-known
directory that any user process can write to.
Stuart.
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