[SlugBug] what is /dev/shm ???

[Bill Best]

hi

i appear to have a partition on a server called /dev/shm which looks 
like this using df -H

Filesystem       Size   Used  Avail Use% Mounted on
none             792MB  0     792MB 0%   /dev/shm

it is empty and has never had any files or data in it, afaik.

cat /etc/fstab gives me the following:

none         /dev/shm         tmpfs   defaults        0 0

so, is this partition real physical storage or is it a virtual area for 
temporary files?

ideally, i would like to transfer files into it as i need to use the 
space - but i suspect that this is neither possible and/or it's a silly 
thing to do.

i suspect that it's virtual and unusable by me as it has no filesystem.

any ideas?

many thanks in advance.

bb