15mb file exist but doesn't appear in ls or find

[Sean Sheridan Coleman X5672]

I own a SparcStation 1+ running 4.1 SunOS. I created a large mail folder of 
~ 15mb. When I ran mail, my /tmp directory reduced in size by 15mb but I can't
find a single file that is 15mb large. I found the inode number of the file 
but doing a find -inum in /tmp, that file didn't show. What gives?

On the same line, if the content of my large file is in /tmp physically, hoe
can a programmer write code to do a similar operation, ie put data on a disk
without creating a file?

Third, I want to write a program to sort the mail. I had two ideas to do this:
1. create a linked list of structures that contained the key I wanted to sort on,
the offset into the file where the mail message starts and ends. I would then
sort the linked list and write back the file to disk using the lseek() calls .

2. The second idea I had was to do a quick sort or merge sort using random access
sorting but I wondered how to swap the contents of one place on the disk with the
other place on the disk. If one message were larger then the other message,
wouldn't the larger message write over the message that followed the old message
that you switched with? Is there a way to push all the messages that follow the
smaller of the two messages to make room for the new larger message?

Are there other ideas out there to do this sort?

Thanks very much for the assistance.

Sean Coleman
NIST

Boulder, CO

coleman at bldrdoc.gov