sticky(5)
NAME
sticky - mark files for special treatment
DESCRIPTION
The sticky bit (file mode bit 01000, see chmod(2)) is used
to indicate special treatment of certain files and direc-
tories. A directory for which the sticky bit is set res-
tricts deletion of files it contains. A file in a sticky
directory may only be removed or renamed by a user who has
write permission on the directory, and either owns the file,
owns the directory, or is the super-user. This is useful for
directories such as /tmp, which must be publicly writable,
but should deny users permission to arbitrarily delete or
rename the files of others.
If the sticky bit is set on a regular file and no execute
bits are set, the system's page cache will not be used to
hold the file's data. This bit is normally set on swap files
of diskless clients so that accesses to these files do not
flush more valuable data from the system's cache. Moreover,
by default such files are treated as swap files, whose inode
modification times may not necessarily be correctly recorded
on permanent storage.
Any user may create a sticky directory. See chmod for
details about modifying file modes.
FILES
/tmp
SEE ALSO
chmod(1), chmod(2), chown(2), mkdir(2)
BUGS
mkdir(2) will not create a directory with the sticky bit
set.
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