I spoke too soon:
A few kind souls have written to me explaining that the above is a bad idea
for the following reasons (as explained by Frank Cusack <frank@fore.com>):
1: /tmp is cleared out on reboot, /var/tmp is persistent ... Programs write
temp data they DO care about across failures into /var/tmp. eg: vi -r
2: /var should (like /tmp) NEVER share a partition with /. Data
in /var is known to grow and grow, and potentially become VERY large.
eg: print jobs.
Frank also reccomends a separate partition for both /var and /tmp -- this
was hinted to in previous emails sent to me originally, but it didn't quite
sink in...
In addition, Rich Kulawiec <rsk@itw.com> wrote in response to my mentioning
tmpfs support in SunOS:
>No kernel modifications are necessary unless you have *already* done
>modifications and ripped out TMPFS support -- in which case you have
>to put it back in. This a matter of uncommenting a single line and
>rebuilding the kernel. If you've done the former, then you know
>how to do the latter.
>
>The modification to /etc/fstab are trivial; adding:
>
> swap /tmp tmp rw 0 0
>
>is all that's necessary.
then just uncomment the "mount /tmp" line in rc.local.
Thanks to all for their extended answers to this question,
Harry
--- Harry Ford * hford@economeister.com * Market News Service, New York NY