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A temporary file is a file created to store information temporarily, either for a program's intermediate use or for transfer to a permanent file when complete. [1] It may be created by computer programs for a variety of purposes, such as when a program cannot allocate enough memory for its tasks, when the program is working on data bigger than the architecture's address space, or as a ...
mktemp is a command available in many Unix-like operating systems that creates a temporary file or directory. [1] Originally released in 1997 as part of OpenBSD 2.1, [2] a separate implementation exists as a part of GNU Coreutils. [3] There used to be a similar named C library function, which is now deprecated for being unsafe, and has safer ...
In computing, mkstemp is a POSIX function for creating a temporary file (a computer file which usually ceases to exist when the program, which opened the file, closes it or terminates). [1] It accepts an argument that determines the location of the temporary file, and the prefix of its generated filename. [ 1 ]
TMPDIR is the canonical environment variable in Unix and POSIX [1] that should be used to specify a temporary directory for scratch space.Most Unix programs will honor this setting and use its value to denote the scratch area for temporary files instead of the common default of /tmp [2] [3] or /var/tmp.
In Unix and Linux, the global temporary directories are /tmp and /var/tmp. Web browsers periodically write data to the tmp directory during page views and downloads. Typically, /var/tmp is for persistent files (as it may be preserved over reboots), and /tmp is for more temporary files.
Process substitution can also be used to capture output that would normally go to a file, and redirect it to the input of a process. The Bash syntax for writing to a process is >(command). Here is an example using the tee, wc and gzip commands that counts the lines in a file with wc -l and compresses it with gzip in one pass:
While MS-DOS and NT always treat the suffix after the last period in a file's name as its extension, in UNIX-like systems, the final period does not necessarily mean that the text after the last period is the file's extension. [1] Some file formats, such as .txt or .text, may be listed multiple times.
File extension(s) [a] MIME type [b] Official name [c] Platform [d] Description .a, .ar application/x-archive Unix Archiver: Unix-like The traditional archive format on Unix-like systems, now used mainly for the creation of static libraries. .cpio application/x-cpio cpio: Unix-like RPM files