How can I test if my /tmp "works"?

Question

I had to delete some files and whatever, long story, I ran sudo rm -rf /tmp/.

Now, on mac (might be universal, I'm not sure) it is a symlink to /private/tmp/. But my /tmp/ folder has a thumbnail which looks like a broken symlink in Finder (graphical).

But cding to tmp works. How can I see if the folder was recreated sucessfully?

$ stat -x /tmp/
File: "/tmp/"
Size: 238          FileType: Directory
Mode: (1777/drwxrwxrwt)         Uid: (    0/    root)  Gid: (    0/   wheel)
Device: 1,4   Inode: 68494519    Links: 7
Access: Wed Feb 18 14:35:10 2015
Modify: Wed Feb 18 14:31:16 2015
Change: Wed Feb 18 14:31:16 2015

Answer 1

Just for reference, since you pretty much answer your question yourself... On Mac OS X /tmp is a symlink to /private/tmp. Both are owned by root:wheel; /tmp has mode 0755, /private/tmp has mode 1777. There is no tmpfs-style filesystem involved.

As terdon says, if the Finder gets confused, restarting it (or rebooting) should fix things. But even without that, as long as /tmp exists as described above, the system should work fine.

Answer 2

/tmp is a Virtual File System such as sysfs. Before any action you have to umount /tmp/, then remove it. However almost all Unix OSes need it, so I don't know why you want to remove /tmp.
UPDATE:
In GNU\Linux OS: /tmp didn't mount and if you grep in mount:

root@debian:~# mount
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
proc on /proc type proc (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
udev on /dev type devtmpfs (rw,relatime,size=10240k,nr_inodes=751838,mode=755)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime,gid=5,mode=620,ptmxmode=000)
tmpfs on /run type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,relatime,size=1206328k,mode=755)
/dev/sda3 on / type ext4 (rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro,data=ordered)
securityfs on /sys/kernel/security type securityfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev)
tmpfs on /run/lock type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,size=5120k)
tmpfs on /sys/fs/cgroup type tmpfs (ro,nosuid,nodev,noexec,mode=755)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,xattr,release_agent=/lib/systemd/systemd-cgroups-agent,name=systemd)
pstore on /sys/fs/pstore type pstore (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,cpuset)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu,cpuacct type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,cpu,cpuacct)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/devices type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,devices)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/freezer type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,freezer)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/net_cls,net_prio type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,net_cls,net_prio)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/blkio type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,blkio)
cgroup on /sys/fs/cgroup/perf_event type cgroup (rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,perf_event)
systemd-1 on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type autofs (rw,relatime,fd=21,pgrp=1,timeout=300,minproto=5,maxproto=5,direct)
mqueue on /dev/mqueue type mqueue (rw,relatime)
debugfs on /sys/kernel/debug type debugfs (rw,relatime)
hugetlbfs on /dev/hugepages type hugetlbfs (rw,relatime)
fusectl on /sys/fs/fuse/connections type fusectl (rw,relatime)
tmpfs on /run/user/1000 type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,size=603164k,mode=700,uid=1000,gid=1000)
gvfsd-fuse on /run/user/1000/gvfs type fuse.gvfsd-fuse (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=1000,group_id=1000)

But some Unixes uses /tmp as tmpfs.
You can do it :

mount |grep -i tmp