What is Sticky bit?

Sticky bit

The most common use of the sticky bit today is on directories, where, when set, items inside the directory can only be renamed or deleted by the item's owner, the directory's owner, or the superuser. Generally this is set on the /tmp directory to prevent ordinary users from deleting or moving other users' files.

In addition, Solaris (as of Solaris 2.5) defines special behavior when the sticky bit is set on non-executable files: those files, when accessed, will not be cached by the kernel. This is usually set on swap files to prevent access on the file from flushing more important data from the system cache. It is also used occasionally for benchmarking tests.

Examples
The sticky bit can only be set by superuser root. Using the chmod command, it can be set using its octal mode 1000 or by its symbol t (s is already used by the setuid bit). For example, to add the bit on the directory /usr/local/tmp, one would type chmod +t /usr/local/tmp. Or, to make sure that directory has standard tmp permissions, one could also type chmod 1777 /usr/local/tmp.

In Unix symbolic file system permission notation, the sticky bit is represented by the letter t in the final character-place. For instance, on Solaris 8, the /tmp directory, which by default has the sticky-bit set, shows up as:

$ ls -ld /tmp

drwxrwxrwt 4 root sys 485 Nov 10 06:01 /tmp



If the sticky-bit is set on a file or directory without the execution bit set for the others category (non-user-owner and non-group-owner), it is indicated with a capital T:

# ls -l test

-rw-r--r-- 1 root other 0 Nov 10 12:57 test

# chmod +t test; ls -l test

-rw-r--r-T 1 root other 0 Nov 10 12:57 test