Re: Tired of /tmp? Here's a proposed solution

[mjb () sophos com (Matthew J Brown)]

Guido M. Witmond writes:
> Well, this is a good quick hack. What about removing the CONCEPT of
> public writable filesystems like /tmp.
>
> One of the reasons for the /tmp filesystem is to provide users with some
> extra diskspace that's for temporary use and does not limit users to their
> respective quotas.
> Nowadays with ever larger and cheaper disks it is acceptable to let every
> user create a ~/tmp directory as a private scrapyard. This prevents any
> /tmp attacks and the use of the quota-system gives enough flexibility
> to enlarge or reduce the area, even more than the fixed size of /tmp.

/tmp still has many advantages, though.

Firstly, it's pretty much guaranteed to be a local filesystem, and not
on an NFS partition.  This gives better performance.  On some systems
it's a tmpfs partition, with the advantage of even better performance
and automatic deletion on reboot.

Secondly, it's an area that's automatically deleted every so often, so
has a different 'feel' to it than a ~/tmp.

Thirdly, it's often used to pass files to other users on the same
system.


I think what is actually needed is to have a directory /tmp/<user> for
each user on the system.  This keeps advantages one and two: it's a
local disk and automatically deleted.  This directory should be owned
by the user and mode 700.


Then a space ought to be set up for the temporary exchange of files
between users, called something like /common.  This should also be
automatically deleted, but programs should not automatically create
temp files here.


-Matt