On Fri, 14 Oct 2005 01:00 am, Craig White wrote: > not sure that I really want this thread to continue but... > > historically, I have gathered that the different structures were > separated for security purposes. If you run say a web server that > collects data and writes it to /tmp, you would probably have noexec set > on /tmp so that nothing could be executed from there. > Historically it does way back, to the 70s when disks were slow and expensive and removable disk packs were good for the biceps. The root file system was small but fast. It contained enough to get the system running. The commonly-used commands were there in /bin for speed. Then if you were rich you could add on a larger but slow disk drive and mount it on /usr. This is where the users had their home directories. Often it would be a drive with a removable disk pack. You would have to book time to get your project's pack in the machine. If you were compiling you would want the temporary (intermediate) files to be on the fastest drive so /tmp was created. Over time more system stuff overflowed from root to /usr into places like /usr/bin, /usr/lib etc. So now /usr is a system partition and user home directories go in /home. Nowadays it's clear that /tmp is a security nightmare since it is shared and writable by everyone. There have been many security alerts about /tmp file races. IMHO /tmp should be deprecated and each user should have its own that is strictly private. You can try this out by creating $HOME/tmp and setting the $TMPDIR to it. Most temp files should automatically end up in $TMPDIR.
