I've grown rather fond lately of creating tmpfs here and there to speed up various activities. (I think it is awesome that RAM can be mounted to a directory!)

The downside though, is that this requires root privileges. I don't really like this because then I either have to go root each time I want a tmpfs, or I have to add a new line to fstab each time I want a tmpfs in some new, odd place. (This becomes doubly weird when the odd place is somewhere like inside my personal home directory.)

Is there some other utility out there that can mount RAM as a filesystem, but allow mounting to be done without root privileges? It seems like this shouldn't be an issue, since a normal user has the ability to create and manipulate directories as well as borrow as much RAM as he wants.

Isn't that what sudo was invented for ?.

Sigh... once again, my zero-reply status stolen away by someone who doesn't have the answer.

Yes, I already use password-less sudo. The problem isn't typing an extra four letter word. The problem is I feel I shouldn't have to invoke root privileges to mount a tmpfs (or some equivalent) at /scratch/username/specialproject/buildcache/ (or whatever) every time it occurs to me to do so. And it seems even stranger to have to put each of these directories in fstab for them to be automatically mounted, as fstab is really meant for global purposes (not the whims of a single user).

Anyway, I was just curious if there was some kind of user-space solution. I remember in the past using the fuse module with the fusermount tool to mount certain file systems without needing root privileges each time. I was wondering if there was something similar for a RAM-based file system.