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?

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

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