1sticky(5)             Standards, Environments, and Macros            sticky(5)
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NAME

6       sticky - mark files for special treatment
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DESCRIPTION

9       The sticky bit (file mode bit  01000, see chmod(2)) is used to indicate
10       special treatment of certain files and  directories.  A  directory  for
11       which the sticky bit is set restricts deletion of files it contains.  A
12       file in a sticky directory can only be removed or renamed by a user who
13       has  write  permission on the directory, and either owns the file, owns
14       the directory, has write permission on the file,  or  is  a  privileged
15       user.  Setting  the  sticky bit is useful for directories such as /tmp,
16       which must be publicly writable but should  deny  users  permission  to
17       arbitrarily delete or rename the files of others.
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20       If the sticky bit is set on a regular file and no execute bits are set,
21       the system's page cache will not be used to hold the file's data.  This
22       bit  is normally set on swap files of diskless clients so that accesses
23       to these files do not flush more valuable data from the system's cache.
24       Moreover,  by default such files are treated as swap files, whose inode
25       modification times may not necessarily be correctly recorded on  perma‐
26       nent storage.
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29       Any  user  may  create  a sticky directory. See chmod for details about
30       modifying file modes.
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SEE ALSO

33       chmod(1), chmod(2), chown(2), mkdir(2), rename(2), unlink(2)
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BUGS

36       The mkdir(2) function will not create a directory with the  sticky  bit
37       set.
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41SunOS 5.11                        1 Aug 2002                         sticky(5)
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