/tmp filesystem full

[Robert Bonomi]

> From owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org  Wed Aug 22 08:27:59 2012
> Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2012 14:25:51 +0100
> From: "Steve O'Hara-Smith" <steve at sohara.org>
> To: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> Subject: Re: /tmp filesystem full
>
> On Wed, 22 Aug 2012 08:14:35 -0500 (CDT)
> Robert Bonomi <bonomi at mail.r-bonomi.com> wrote:
>
> > > From owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org  Wed Aug 22 05:59:52 2012
> > > Date: Wed, 22 Aug 2012 12:59:13 +0200
> > > From: Andy Wodfer <wodfer at gmail.com>
> > > To: freebsd-questions <freebsd-questions at freebsd.org>
> > > Subject: /tmp filesystem full
> > >
> > > Hi,
> > > I have about 500MB in my /tmp and it seems to be too small when the
> > > periodic LOCATE script runs every week.
> > >
> > > What's the best way to increase the size of /tmp ? Could I simply
> > > remove it and create a symbolic link ln -s to say /usr/tmp instead
> > > (where I have several hundred GBs free)?
> > 
> > That is a BAD IDEA(tm)!
> > 
> > There are appliations that assume /tmp, /var/tmp, and /usr/tmp are
> > _distinct_ directories.  They will create files _with_the_same_name_ in
> > two of those 'temp' locations, expecting them to be unique.o
>
> 	/usr/tmp usually does not exist so creating it and
> symlinking /tmp to it is OK.

I've used enough different versions of Unix wher '/usr/tmp/ _was_ a standard
diretory to be *very* leery.  <wry grin>