TEMPFILE(1)

✨ NAME ✨

Okay bestie, meet tempfile from the TEMPFILE(1) manual page 🧚. Its whole job is to make a temporary file in a safe way 🔐

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

tempfile [-d DIR] [-p STRING] [-s STRING] [-m MODE] [-n FILE]
[--directory=DIR] [--prefix=STRING] [--suffix=STRING] [--mode=MODE]
[--name=FILE] [--help] [--version]

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

okay so tempfile creates a temporary file the safe way 💅 It uses mkstemps(3) to pick the name, then opens it with O_RDWR | O_CREAT | O_EXCL. Once it's made, the filename gets printed on standard output 🦋

The directory where the file gets created is picked in this order, no cap:

a) If the environment variable TMPDIR exists and holds the name of a valid directory, that wins 👑

b) Otherwise, if the --directory argument is given and it's valid, that gets used 🌸

c) Otherwise, P_tmpdir (as defined in <stdio.h>) gets used when it makes sense 🫶

d) Finally, an implementation-defined directory (/tmp) might get used ✨

🌈 OPTIONS 🌈

• -d, --directory DIR — put the file inside DIR 📁
• -m, --mode MODE — open the file with MODE instead of the default 0600 🔒
• -n, --name FILE — use FILE as the name instead of going through tempnam(3). Heads up: -d, -p, and -s get ignored if you pass this one 🙈
• -p, --prefix STRING — grab up to five letters of STRING to build the name 🧁
• -s, --suffix STRING — make the file with STRING tacked on as the suffix 🍓
• --help — prints a usage message on standard output and exits successfully 💜
• --version — prints version info on standard output and exits successfully 🔥

🧚 RETURN VALUES 🧚

An exit status of 0 means the temp file got created successfully ✨ Literally any other exit status means something went wrong 💀

🙈 BUGS 🙈

⚠️ Exclusive creation is not guaranteed when you're making files on NFS partitions. Be careful bestie!

tempfile can't make temporary directories, so don't even try 😭 Also, tempfile is deprecated, so you should use mktemp(1) instead 💅

💅 EXAMPLE 💅

Here's how you'd use it in a shell script, periodt:

#!/bin/sh
#[...]
t=$(tempfile) || exit
trap "rm -f -- '$t'" EXIT
#[...]
rm -f -- "$t"
trap - EXIT
exit

🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

tempnam(3), mktemp(1) 🫶

Bye bestie, that's the whole TEMPFILE(1) tea 💖 Debian, 27 Jun 2012 vibes forever 🌈✨