Mandriva 2008 "export TMPDIR="

# su - root
# mkdir //tmp
# chown root.root //tmp
# chmod 1777 //tmp
# export TEMP=/
# export TMPDIR=/
# su - root
# rmdir //tmp
# unset TEMP
# unset TMPDIR

I think your the man. I will do this tonight. Is it possible for you to (in s small nutshell) explain what these commands are doing?

why "- root" on the first command?
on "export TEMP=/" do I need to place the path of where I want it ; "export TEMP=/media/hd4/TMP" or are they just as written. I wanted to move it to /media/hd4/TMP, but it failed when typed like this last night:
export TMPDIR=/media/hd4/TMP

Anyhow, I will try as you wrote it tonight and post the results. Thanks

MemTotal:       905504 kB

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hdc1             7.7G  3.2G  4.2G  43% /
/dev/hdc6              44G  818M   43G   2% /home
/dev/sdb1             7.7G  3.7G  3.6G  51% /media/hd
/dev/sdb6              62G   18G   44G  30% /media/hd2
/dev/sda1             136G   95G   41G  71% /media/hd3
/dev/sda5              98G   12G   87G  12% /media/hd4
/dev/sr0              871M  871M     0 100% /media/BS

SwapTotal:     8177000 kB

[root@localhost /]# su - root
[root@localhost ~]# mkdir //tmp
mkdir: cannot create directory `//tmp': File exists
[root@localhost ~]# chown root.root //tmp
[root@localhost ~]# chmod 1777 //tmp
[root@localhost ~]# export TEMP=/
[root@localhost ~]# export TMPDIR=/
[root@localhost ~]# su - root
[root@localhost ~]# rmdir //tmp
rmdir: failed to remove `//tmp': Directory not empty
[root@localhost ~]# unset TEMP
[root@localhost ~]# unset TMPDIR

here is the result

This is the return. I made a folder called tater to be sure it is working.

[root@localhost trivious]# mkdir / /tmp
mkdir: cannot create directory `/': File exists
mkdir: cannot create directory `/tmp': File exists
[root@localhost trivious]# mkdir tmp
mkdir: cannot create directory `tmp': File exists
[root@localhost trivious]# mkdir /tmp
mkdir: cannot create directory `/tmp': File exists
[root@localhost trivious]# mkdir /tater
[root@localhost trivious]#

None of this has worked. I can't figure it out for the life of me either. I'm MCSA not LinCSA lol, so I'm closing this one out and moving on to another distro. Perhaps Feisty. I tried the new Fedora 9 (Sulphur), by the way, and it is chalked full of issues. It makes you pay for MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 supporting codecs. Tarded! Youu can find the right codecs for it, but as far as that goes . . . why should you have to? Its just a codec. Owell on to Feisty. Thanks for trying guys.