Another rkhunter question

[Gene Heskett]

Greetings all;

What is /dev/shm?

I've given up on rkhunter ever shutting up about the group and passwd files, 
but fussing about this is new.
---------------------- Start Rootkit Hunter Scan ----------------------
Warning: Suspicious file types found in /dev:
         /dev/shm/sem.ADBE_REL_root: data
         /dev/shm/sem.ADBE_WritePrefs_root: data
         /dev/shm/sem.ADBE_ReadPrefs_root: data

And indeed, these files that I nuked friday are back:
[root at coyote linux-2.6.30-rc6]# ls -l /dev/shm
total 24
-r-------- 1 root root 67108904 2009-05-16 02:37 pulse-shm-3724332759
-rw-rw-rw- 1 root root       16 2009-05-16 20:33 sem.ADBE_ReadPrefs_root
-rw-rw-rw- 1 root root       16 2009-05-16 20:33 sem.ADBE_REL_root
-rw-rw-rw- 1 root root       16 2009-05-16 20:33 sem.ADBE_WritePrefs_root

Anything with 'pulse' in its name has been nuked by an 'rpm -e', and I 
actually have working audio now, so can someone please explain this?  A 67 
megabyte file in /dev for an shm device is for what purpose?

I looked at it with mc's hex viewer, and the first 10 or so megabytes are all 
$00.  I got tired of standing on the page down key.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
... bacteriological warfare ... hard to believe we were once foolish
enough to play around with that.
		-- McCoy, "The Omega Glory", stardate unknown