Handling Temporary Files

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Chewy509

Joined: 19 Jun 2003
Posts: 297
Location: Bris-vegas, Australia

Chewy509 05 Nov 2007, 04:25

I would ask this question in Linux or Windows, but I guess it applies to all OSes?

What methods do people use to generate and keep track of temporary files used by their applications.

While glibc (on *nix systems) has tmpfile(), it doesn't have a corresponding close and delete call where you just supply a handle...

Windows expects the user to do all the heavy lifting, and only provides APIs for getting the current TMP directory... (unless you use .NET).

My current policy is to use: <pid>b0_1.tmp, <pid>b0_2.tmp, etc for the tmp filenames, the problem being is, is there a universal method for determining the tmp folder?

Is it safe to assume '/tmp' and '%TMP%' or '%TEMP%' are always available?

PS. adding the PID to the temp filename ensures that the temp files are assigned to a single process, and therefore other compiler processes won't accidently overwrite them...

PPS. On Windows, using CreateFile can I just use the '%TMP%\tmp.tmp' as the filename, or do I have to find what %TMP% is, and build the filename manually?

05 Nov 2007, 04:25

LocoDelAssembly
Your code has a bug

Joined: 06 May 2005
Posts: 4623
Location: Argentina

LocoDelAssembly 05 Nov 2007, 04:35

Quote:

PPS. On Windows, using CreateFile can I just use the '%TMP%\tmp.tmp' as the filename, or do I have to find what %TMP% is, and build the filename manually?

Quote:

The GetTempPath function retrieves the path of the directory designated for temporary files. This function supersedes the GetTempDrive function.

DWORD GetTempPath(

DWORD nBufferLength, // size, in characters, of the buffer
LPTSTR lpBuffer // address of buffer for temp. path
);

Parameters

nBufferLength

Specifies the size, in characters, of the string buffer identified by lpBuffer.

lpBuffer

Points to a string buffer that receives the null-terminated string specifying the temporary file path.

Take a look at GetTempFileName for reference about building a file name.

05 Nov 2007, 04:35

Chewy509

Joined: 19 Jun 2003
Posts: 297
Location: Bris-vegas, Australia

Chewy509 05 Nov 2007, 04:56

Thanks, I'm glad that Microsoft doesn't like to make things easy... Wink

05 Nov 2007, 04:56

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