[TriLUG] Re: running out of disk space?

[Scott G. Hall]

Jason Tower <jason at cerient.net> wrote:

>depening on the download method used, the file is actually downloaded 
>into /tmp first, then copied to the final destination when complete.  
>i'm pretty sure most browsers work in this fashion, although it may 
>depend on whether they are downloading via ftp or http.  so if your 
>/tmp fills up the download will fail, if you're downloading three ISOs 
>simultaneously you'll need 2GB of free space in /tmp for it to work.
>
>jason
>
>On Wednesday 09 April 2003 11:09, mike wrote:
>
>> I was trying to download the iso's for RH9 today and keep running
>> into an error that says something like "disk space full...clear out
>> any unused files and try again...."  I don't understand why this is
>> happening.  I'm trying to save the files to my /home/mike/Desktop dir
>> and it would appear that I have plenty of space.
>

You might consider a console FTP app instead of a browser.  That way /tmp
won't be used as an intermediary.  Beware, some of the "accelerated" ftp
clients that open multiple streams to download a file faster will still
use /tmp to download the individual chucks, and then combine them together
at your final destination.

Another solution is to set your TEMP environment variable.  Many programs
-- not all -- will utilize this variable to create temporary files in.
The mktemp() library routine uses this variable, and therefore so does
the tempnam(), tmpnam(), tmpfile() and their C++ equivalent templates.
This means that vi, vim, BSD's ftp, EMACS and many others will honor it.
I don't know about Mozilla or Konqueror, or the various FTP clients.

On my Xandros box -- and I have just convinced my Mandrake 9.1 too -- the
profile scripts setup the user's TEMP variable to point to a directory
under their home directory.  This is also something that Solaris has begun
using, and according to Sun's pages, "it is to avoid similarly named
temporary files from multiple users overwriting each other, and to hide
temporary files from being observed or hacked by others".

Create a subdir:

    md ~/tmp

and then set the TEMP variable to:  "$HOME/tmp"  (per your shell).

You can create this directory for each user (owned and writable by that
user, and not visible to others) and also add this directory in the
defaults area to be created for all new users.

I would do it anyway, but give it shot now and see if your browser honors
new temp dir.  And then let us all know it is works for you.

-- 
Scott G. Hall,
Raleigh, NC, USA
ScottGHall at BellSouth.Net