What does SUID, SGID and Sticky bits do on inappropriate files?

[Barry Margolin]

In article <BZS.90Dec28205902 at world.std.com> bzs at world.std.com (Barry Shein) writes:
[Regarding sticky executables]
>The major speedup is/was/might-have-been due to the kernel being able
>to pull an executable image from swap faster than from the file system
>(no chasing of indirect blocks and so forth), and the possibility that
>it was still in memory which was faster still.
>
>The more recent file systems which cause text to page in place make
>this consideration more or less obsolete.

Actually, this is still useful on dataless workstations.  Our dataless
workstations have local swap, /, and /usr, but /usr/local generally comes
from an NFS server.  We've noticed significant performance improvement by
setting the sticky bit on Lisp images, as it effectively causes the
workstations to use their local swap space as a cache.
--
Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar at think.com
{uunet,harvard}!think!barmar