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Save your disk, write files directly into RAM with /dev/shm
Given my interest in extending the life of my SD cards and hard drives as much as possible, I’m surprised I haven’t come across /dev/shm before. In a word it’s a world-accessible RAM scratchpad, which seems baked right into POSIX, so that virtually every Unix system already has it mounted as a tmpfs by default: 1 2 ❯ mount | grep '/dev/shm' tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,inode64) Today’s lucky 10,000, indeed.
In a word it’s a world-accessible RAM scratchpad, which seems baked right into POSIX, so that virtually every Unix system already has it mounted as a tmpfs by default: If you can live with that, and if you don’t run memory hog programs 24/7, you can put things you’re currently working with in there to mess with to your heart’s content, and get a few orders of magnitude more performance out of anything you might want to do with those files. In general I have found that moving 1-4 GB files I expect to work heavily with into/dev/shm first makes operating on them with standard command-line tools much, much more pleasant.
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