debian man page for sticky

sticky(5)                                               Standards, Environments, and Macros                                              sticky(5)

NAME
       sticky - mark files for special treatment

DESCRIPTION
       The sticky bit (file mode bit  01000, see chmod(2)) is used to indicate special treatment of certain files and directories. A directory for
       which the sticky bit is set restricts deletion of files it contains.  A file in a sticky directory can only be removed or renamed by a user
       who  has  write permission on the directory, and either owns the file, owns the directory, has write permission on the file, or is a privi-
       leged user. Setting the sticky bit is useful for directories such as /tmp, which must be publicly writable but should deny users permission
       to arbitrarily delete or rename the files of others.

       If  the  sticky bit is set on a regular file and no execute bits are set, the system's page cache will not be used to hold the file's data.
       This bit is normally set on swap files of diskless clients so that accesses to these files do not flush more valuable data  from  the  sys-
       tem's  cache.  Moreover,  by  default such files are treated as swap files, whose inode modification times may not necessarily be correctly
       recorded on permanent storage.

       Any user may create a sticky directory. See chmod for details about modifying file modes.

SEE ALSO
       chmod(1), chmod(2), chown(2), mkdir(2), rename(2), unlink(2)

BUGS
       The mkdir(2) function will not create a directory with the sticky bit set.

SunOS 5.10                                                          1 Aug 2002                                                           sticky(5)