Does OS X have an equivalent to /dev/shm?
Does OS X (Snow Leopard in particular) have an equivalent to (some versions of) Linux's /dev/shm , ie something where you can write to and read from a file without necessarily touching the hard drive? You can create and mount a ram based disk as follows: Create a disk $ hdiutil attach -nomount ram://$((2 * 1024 * SIZE_IN_MB)) hdiutil will return the name of the ramdisk. Format and mount the disk diskutil eraseVolume HFS+ RAMDisk NAME_OF_DISK Creating a 100MB ramdisk: $ hdiutil attach -nomount ram://$((2 * 1024 * 100)) /dev/disk3 $ diskutil eraseVolume HFS+ RAMDisk /dev/disk3 Started erase on