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The "Sticky bit" in a unix or Linux filesystem was originally designed to tell the OS to keep the program in cache, even after it loaded, so it would "stick" in memory. Although it made it faster to load the program the next time, it also made it difficult to do maintenance on the program, and it wasted memory if the program fell out of common use. For speedy program accesss, modern filesystem caches do a very good job, so the sticky bit is not often used for this any more.

Instead, the sticky bit, when applied to a directory, means: if a user writes a file to this directory, only let that user change that file. It is very common for the /tmp directory to have the sticky bit set. /tmp is a shared resource that every user can write to, so the sticky bit makes sure that users cannot interfere with each other's temp files.

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