Michael A. Peters wrote: > Nothing in /tmp should be expected to survive a reboot. > In fact, some people like to run /tmp as a tempfs (temporary file > system) - only problem is, a tempfs can get full if you aren't careful. So can a regular /tmp. Modern tmpfs uses both memory and swap-space, depending on "memory pressure" (whether the kernel thinks it has a better use for real memory than using it for a particular tmpfs page). It has a sysadmin-configurable maximum size: "the default is half of your physical RAM without swap", but you can dynamically change that. So you can add (some of) the disk space you would have used for /tmp to swap space, and either reclaim a bit of space, or get extra protection against /tmp or memory filling up. I'd also note that there are worse things that can happen to a server than /tmp getting full. For example, the filesystem containing /var/spool on a mailserver. If you just have the one filesystem, then /tmp filling that filesystem will obviously lead to /var/spool's filesystem being full... Putting this in /etc/fstab should work: none /tmp tmpfs defaults,nodev 0 0 (You may not want to set nodev, or set noexec as well...) See /usr/src/linux/Documentation/filesystems/tmpfs.txt or http://lxr.linux.no/source/Documentation/filesystems/tmpfs.txt for more details. Finally, I'd note that the FHS explicitly *recommends* that /tmp be cleared out on system boot, and requires that "Programs must not assume that any files or directories in /tmp are preserved between invocations of the program." (http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#TMPTEMPORARYFILES). Hope this helps, James. -- E-mail address: james | "The letters are Elvish, of an ancient mode, but the @westexe.demon.co.uk | language is that of Microsoft, which I will not utter | here. But this in the Common Tongue is what is said: | By this or any other name, You are well and truly..."
