Shell Programming and Scripting

i've always been of the mind that having to write to disk is very sloppy and dirty. i personally hate this.

so i wonder, is there a way to have a shell script/program write to memory and access whatever it has in memory whenever it wants. pretty much treat memory like hard disk.

can someone help with this?

i know i can store information in variables, but i'm not sure if variables can store ANY information like flat files on hard disks can.

you can always create a ramdisk and use it like you would use any other disk - like creating filesystems in it - problem is that everything will be gone when the server crashes / restarts that hasn't been saved to physical storage - which is obviously not desired for permanently required data but can for performance reasons be quite useful for any kind of volatile content, i.e. for sybase tempdb's or similar things
Regards
zxmaus

Or, even simpler, your script can create files in a tmpfs that resides on a ramdisk that you already have on your computer, assuming you're using linux (you didn't say).

You can google about this for more details, but all you really need to know to get started is that if you have a /dev/shm/ on your system, your scripts can use it for temporary in-ram storage.