Joe> How temporary is /tmp? 

/tmp is permanent. The stuff in it isn't.
			      
  Joe>			      I've downloaded Firefox
  Joe> twice (both times into /tmp) to play around with
  Joe> it and both times (next day) when I went back it
  Joe> was gone. Is there something running (debian)
  Joe> that gets rid of anything in /tmp or am I just
  Joe> loosing it?

Have you been rebooting between downloads? It's been
years since I've looked closely at that, but the usual
process on Unix systems I've dealt with (many) is to
delete everything in /tmp when a system is rebooted. 

Directories and files with names that start with '.' 
(dot) are not removed, just ordinary files. So if you
put it in a subdirectory in /tmp it should still be
there between boots.

Or put it in /var/tmp. As far as I know, that stuff is
not touched between boots.

I've never looked to see where this is done. It's not
cron, as someone else suggested. Unless your system has
a specal process in place to keep /tmp cleaned up.

Generally, it's not a good idea to put anything in /tmp
that you want to stay around. That's why they call it
tmp (temporary) after all.

-- 
Lynn David Newton
Phoenix, AZ
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