RE:/tmp size

[Andrew Agno <agno@AI.SRI.COM>]

Richard Otte writes:
 > I recently discovered that /tmp on my machine is rather small, around
 > 50mb.  I was trying to use xcdroast, but was unable to extract an audio
 > cd to /tmp because it wasn't big enough.  This is strange, because I
 > probably have 50gb empty on my hard drive.  I'm wondering if /tmp is a
 > separate partition (is this my swap partition?) or why it won't use up
 > the empty disk space.  I don't know how to find out the exact limits
 > on /tmp, except by what xcdroast told me.
 > 
 > Can anyone explain to me what is going on, and what to do.  Thanks,

Use:
% df
You'll have a line that looks something like:
/dev/hda7              12345   345   12000  3%  /tmp

if you have a separate /tmp partition.

If you don't, you won't see a /tmp, but just a / entry (and possibly
others).  To get more space--make back ups!!! Then, you can use
resize2fs to shrink a partition and make a new one for /tmp.  Or, you
can just not mount /tmp--this means that the partition on which / is
mounted will be used for /tmp.  You may or may not want the latter.
You can then use /tmp for something else, or just delete it by adding
its space to a different partition.

The easiest solution is not to mount /tmp and use /, but requires
enough space in your / partition.  It also means that somebody could
potentially try to use up all your disk space in the root partition by 
filling up /tmp.

Andrew.