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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 ...
After mkstemp was added to the Single UNIX Specification, the function tmpnam() was deprecated, [1] because the latter carried the risk that a temporary file with the same name could be created by another thread or process within the time from when the caller obtains the temporary filename and attempts to create it.
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 ...
In MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows, the temporary directory is set by the environment variable TEMP or TMP. [1] Using the Window API, one can find the path to the temporary directory using the GetTempPath2 function, [2] or one can obtain a path to a uniquely-named temporary file using the GetTempFileName function. [3]
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.
Environment variables are part of the environment in which a process runs. For example, a running process can query the value of the TEMP environment variable to discover a suitable location to store temporary files, or the HOME or USERPROFILE variable to find the directory structure owned by the user running the process.
Bash executes these files as part of its standard initialization, but other startup files can read them in a different order than the documented Bash startup sequence. The default content of the root user's files may also have issues, as well as the skeleton files the system provides to new user accounts upon setup.
Some Linux distributions (e.g. Debian) do not have a tmpfs mounted on /tmp by default; in this case, files under /tmp will be stored in the same file system as /. And on almost all Linux distributions, a tmpfs is mounted on /run/ or /var/run/ to store temporary run-time files such as PID files and Unix domain sockets.