UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I do not believe that uniq uses /tmp. However most shells do. Lots of stuff uses /tmp and it is not good for the system as a whole when it fills.

It doesn't make use of /tmp for sure. I just made a small test - copied 5G log file ! and did sort -nr | uniq. During this time, the /tmp content didn't change, nor the bytes / files within the folder.

Thanks Perdarebo and sysgate !!!

There may well be other tmp directories available -

You can define an environment variable TMPDIR to assign tmp file operations to a directory. Check that.

A lot of systems have /var/tmp for tmp file applications as well as /tmp.

Source for the GNU (coreutils 3.1.1) version of uniq does not use a temporary file, for example. Basically, all it does is to compare sequential lines (or fields, etc. in the line) and discard duplicates.

I just checked my /tmp and it is not being cleared out automatically.

Would it make sense to write a little script to clear the /tmp out on reboot? Or does anyone know of a setting that will do this automatically?

Thx

In some systems (I think I've seen this in HP-UX), there are run control scripts that clear /tmp during reboots. You could check if you have any rc scripts that do this in your OS.

hey I am using the sort command and I think it is using /var/tmp

Now, how can I know how much space is left in /var/tmp ?

I am filling it with large files but its just not running out of space.