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I'm on a managed machine but I'd like to create a folder stored in RAM for temporary storage, how might I do this?

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migrated from stackoverflow.com Feb 13 '12 at 20:45

2 Answers

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AFAIK, you can't create a new tmpfs mount without root privileges.

However, many Linux distos provide a tmpfs mount on /dev/shm that's writable by all users. If it's there, you should be able to abuse use that to store your temporary directory.

On RHEL4/RHEL5:

[me@home]$ mount | grep tmpfs
none on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)

On Ubuntu 11.10, it is mounted on /run/shm:

[me@ubuntu_home]$  mount | grep shm
none on /run/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
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I'm on Scientific Linux which I believe is a spin of RHEL so /dev/shm is working wonderfully well, thank you. – KitB Feb 14 '12 at 13:49
@KitB You're welcome. – Shawn Chin Feb 14 '12 at 14:01
up vote 2 down vote

Without the help of a sysadmin you can't. In fact you need him to use sudo to make you able to mount tmpfs or to put an ad-hoc entry in /etc/fstab .

The point is that mount requires special rights.

Ask your sysadmin

PS: if your system works with tmpfs mounted on /tmp, then you can create a folder there.

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+1 for mentioning that there usually is a tmpfs mounted in world writable /tmp – Kimvais Feb 13 '12 at 16:22
/tmp is not in memory unfortunately – KitB Feb 14 '12 at 13:15

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