Anne Wilson wrote: > That's worth bearing in mind. It looks as though I ought to have a separate > partition for /tmp. I need help, though, to add it at this point. One thing you can do if you have enough swap is to add a tmpfs /tmp. That looks like none /tmp tmpfs defaults,nodev,noexec 0 0 in /etc/fstab. Data in a tmpfs may get stored in memory or may get swapped to disk: the computer handles it in the same way as it handles any other memory. But it *will* be deleted whenever the computer reboots. That means you don't have to worry about clearing out /tmp: it will do it automatically. The nodev,noexec bits are security paranoia: the nodev bit means you can't use device nodes[1] on it, and the noexec bit means you can't run programs from it (which could be a problem in certain circumstances). Hope this helps, James. [1] You know that /dev/hda is a file on disk which *points* to your hard drive? It only represents your hard drive in the same way that an icon, a picture, represents a program? It's theoretically possible to have a /tmp/hda which points to your hard drive in just the same way. -- E-mail address: james | "This thing is bigger than the both of us!" @westexe.demon.co.uk | "Oh Tom! It's ... it's an elephant!"
