Shell tips

To improve performances or avoid disk i/o, one may mount /tmp in memory (mfs). The new fstab entry would look like this :

 swap /tmp mfs rw,nodev,nosuid,-s=800MB 0 0
Of course, replace the size 800MB according to how much memory you want to let for /tmp.

To know how much memory you have, you may use dmesg and awk :

dmesg | awk '/avail mem/'

As example to create a /tmp using 10% of available RAM, the following command will output the line to copy in /etc/fstab to replace "/tmp" entry, using awk to compute the size :

printf "swap /tmp mfs rw,nodev,nosuid,-s=%sB 0 0\n" \
    $(dmesg |awk '/avail mem/ { print int($4 /10) }')

You may have to adjust newly created /tmp permissions:

 # chmod 1777 /tmp