Mounting in-memory file system as a directory
Requirements
- Debian, or derivative operating system.
- 16 GiB of RAM.
'tmpfs', an in-memory file system can be mounted as a directory. It can be used during compilation of a large program, where multiple read-write operations are performed on the file system. It can be used for security reasons, because all files stay in memory and irrecoverably destroyed after the in-memory file system is unmounted.
Preparation
Creating an empty directory.
mkdir ~/MyDir
Mounting the 'tmpfs' in-memory file system
Simple mounting.
sudo mount -t tmpfs -o size=7G tmpfs ~/MyDir
Extra security options.
sudo mount -t tmpfs -o defaults,nosuid,nodev,size=7G tmpfs ~/MyDir
Checking the correctness of mount operation.
df -hl | grep 'tmpfs'
Unmounting the 'tmpfs' in-memory file system
As soon as in-memory file system is unmounted, all it's contents are irrecoverably destroyed.
sudo umount ~/MyDir