Swarthmore College Department of Computer Science

/scratch and /local

If you need temporary storage space, please make use of the /scratch and /local directories.

You can make a directory and plop whatever it is that you need in these directories. However, we *strongly* emphasize the word temporary for this space, as we do not back it up, and it usually gets wiped out every summer.

The /local directories are specific to each lab machine, whereas /scratch should be accessible from any lab machine.

Here's a simple example of using /local: 

POPPY[~]$ cd /local
POPPY[local]$ mkdir username
POPPY[local]$ cd username
POPPY[username]$ mv ~/largefile .

Note: new /scratch dirs -- Aug 2010

To make /scratch easier to maintain and upgrade, we now create a /scratch/username directory for each user. You can make further directories below that, if you want.

For example, if your CS account name is juser1, we already provide a /scratch/juser1 directory for you to use. Just run cd /scratch/juser1 and put your large datasets out there.

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