How to recover unavailable memory in /dev/shm

Posted by Alain Labbe on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by Alain Labbe
Published on 2013-06-25T21:22:59Z Indexed on 2013/06/25 22:29 UTC
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12.04

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tmpfs

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shm

Good day to all, I have a question regarding the use of /dev/shm. I use it as a temporary folder for large files to speed up processing and save IO off the HD. My problem is that some of my scripts sometimes require "forceful" interruption for a variety of reasons. I can then manually remove the files left over in /dev/shm but the memory is not returned to available space (as seen by df -h). Is there any way to recover the memory without restarting the system?

I'm using LTS12.04 and most of the scripts are PERL running system call on C programs (bioinformatics tools).

Thanks.

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