Temp Directory

Igir needs to write some temporary files to disk for a few reasons:

• Downloading DAT URLs to disk before parsing
• Extracting some archives to disk during scanning, and when reading when extracting or zipping

Temporary files are ones that are deleted as soon as Igir no longer needs them for processing. Igir will also delete any leftover temporary files on exit.

Igir will use your operating system's temporary directory for these files by default. The option --temp-dir <path> is provided to let you change the directory, and you may want to do this for a few reasons:

• Your operating system drive has minimal space available
• You want to protect your operating system drive from excess wear and tear
• You want to use a "RAM disk" instead of a real drive

RAM disks

Windows

There are no tools built-in to Windows that can create a RAM disk. The open source ImDisk Toolkit is a popular option.

macOS

The built-in diskutil and hdiutil tools can be used to create and mount a RAM disk. Alex T has some instructions in a GitHub gist.

Linux

tmpfs is a tool that comes with most Linux distributions that is used for creating RAM disks. Oracle has a guide on the tool.