Sticky bit?

[Neil Rickert]

In article <1991Mar24.223426.10401 at cs.umu.se> dvldbg at cs.umu.se (Daniel Brahneborg) writes:
>In <6704 at navy28.UUCP> seda at motcid.UUCP (Joseph W. Seda) writes:
>>What does the stick bit do? I could look through all the man pages and probably
>>still not find all the details.  Can someone help?
>
>The sticky bit is used for changing the user-id of the process that

 Nonsense.

>Check the manual pages for chmod, they should tell you the details.

 I suggest you follow your own advice.

 Today the sticky bit is often used on public directories (such as /tmp) with
the meaning that only the owner of a file can 'rm' that file.

 The original meaning applied to executables.  It meant that the executable
was to remain always in memory, even when not in use.  This is an efficiency
consideration for binaries which are likely to be in use in many processes
at one time.  /bin/sh would be an obvious candidate.  (Of course this applies
only to the text section, and not to data and bss).

 This use probably still applies in some systems.  However, with the use of
virtual memory, and the paging of binaries right out of the executable file,
the need has disappeared in many Unix versions.


-- 
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  Neil W. Rickert, Computer Science               <rickert at cs.niu.edu>
  Northern Illinois Univ.
  DeKalb, IL 60115                                   +1-815-753-6940