Originally posted by: peejayeff
The sticky bit (sometimes called tacky bit -- erroneously IMHO) was originally used to mark executable files so that they would remain in memory. This concept is no longer on modern architectures required so it is now "only" used for directories.
On AIX it essentially means that when you
chmod +t /some/path/to/dir
you allow only users who own files in that directory to remove them.
The concept is most useful when applied to public writable directories where the normal rwx permission (allowing any user to delete a file) needs to be more restrictive -- the classic case being /tmp.
It is also of use when you have public writable FTP (or similar) directories where the data may be seen and anyone may upload to the directory but you wish to not allow any person to remove the files once uploaded. It was the case that the command to make a public FTP setup on AIX did not do this and it was needed to be done manually.
HTH
Phil.
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