repartition /tmp?

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 12:41 AM -0500 5/2/03, nick nelson wrote:
>On Fri May 02, 2003, Dan Nelson propagated the following:
>  > > I appeared to have mitakenly made my /tmp partition on
>  > > this machine way too small (missed a 0 completely.).
>  >
>  > What I end up doing is removing /tmp and symlinking it
>  > to /usr/tmp.
>
>This sounds like a good idea, however it's not as [simple as]
>just deleting it is it?  Since it's a partition, it'll give
>me a 'device busy' error if i try to delete it (as expected.)

I assume you can afford to reboot the machine.

  - Edit /etc/fstab to comment out the entry for /tmp
  - Reboot

You will now have a /tmp directory, and you will not have a
partition mounted over that directory.  Move the /tmp directory
to /tmp-s (and maybe change the /etc/fstab entry to mount the
small partition over /tmp-s, just to have it somewhere), and
then create /tmp as a symlink into somewhere else.

Another tactic which might help is to set the environment
variable named 'TMPDIR' to some other location.  However,
doing it via the environment variable will be a lot more
error-prone (because you have to keep setting that variable
for every process which might chew up a lot of space in /tmp,
and there are plenty of things which ignore that setting even
if you do remember to set it...).

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu