[Tfug] OK: Tell me About the T Bit

Jeremy C. Reed reed at reedmedia.net
Sat Jan 6 20:30:29 MST 2007


> Ah, the "sticky" bit. On files, it would cause the file to be held in swap.
> On directories it restricted deletes or something like that.

Only the owner of the file who also has write permissions to the directoru 
can move or remove the file. (My operating system of choice has a "sticky" 
man page.)

It is a work-around to help with public writable directories (like mail or 
tmp).

On that note ...

Do any of you run systems without any world-writable tmp directory?

Having all software honor TMP or TMPDIR or other configuration, each user 
can have their own scratch space (if needed).

Then unauthorized use of tmp would be eliminated (to stop some security 
issues). Of course mounting tmp as noexec helps there too.



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