Re: password-store /dev/shm mfs

On Tue Aug 11, 2026 at 9:14 AM CEST, David Dahlberg wrote:
 David, 

Sure! But, please note that I am not an expert and, for now, I only 
use OpenBSD as a wonderful UNIX learning experience. 

I don't think you can make it work without operating as root, because 
at least you must create a fake dev/shm under / and mount it as mfs.

Here is step-by-step what I did following the suggestion of Broke:

1) become root
$ doas -s

2) create /dev/shm (if you stop here, pass doesn't complain anymore, but obviously it's a fake, because he doesn't 
realize that it's not a real shm)

# mkdir /dev/shm

3) change permissions (I copied /dev/shm permissions from a linux machine)
# chmod 1777 /dev/shm

4) mount /dev/shm as mfs
# mount -t mfs -o rw,nodev,nosuid,-s=512m /dev/sd2b /dev/shm (my swap partition is /sd2b, check yours)

5) $ pass edit your/password
In this way password-store does not complain anymore...

6) When you're done, unmount /dev/shm 
$ doas umount /dev/shm

7) throw /dev/shm away
$ doas rm -rf /dev/shm (be careful not to delete your root directory...)

If you want it permanent, add a /etc/fstab line (i.e. swap /dev/shm mfs 
rw,noatime,nodev,nosuid,-s=512m 0 0)

In the meanwhile, I found and even simpler way that seems to work either, provided /tmp is permanently mounted as mfs.

Create a symlink named /dev/shm pointing to /tmp. Full stop.
$ doas ln -s /tmp /dev/shm

PS Probably, if you have tmp as mfs, all this is not really needed, because if you answer yes to the pass's 
warning on /dev/shm lacking it should proceed editing your password in tmp anyway...

Ciao!
David

> Can you please send me step-by-step instructions on how you did it exactly? I had a way of doing it on OpenBSD once, which doesn't work anymore for some time, so I removed it.
>
> Can we omit root - or at least handle it propperly? I think, this was the reason why I was not able to convert pass to mfs yet …
>
>
>> Am 2026-08-10 um 16:02 schrieb David Conversi <[email protected]>:
>> 
>> On Mon Aug 10, 2026 at 1:51 PM CEST, broke wrote:
>>> Did it solve the problem?
>> 
>> Yes, it worked! I created /dev/shm, set the right permissions and mounted on mfs with the mount command according
>> to the man page. Thank you!
>>