Is there a cross-platform way of getting the path to the temp directory in Python 2.6?
For example, under Linux that would be /tmp, while under XP C:\Documents and settings\[user]\Application settings\Temp.
298
votes
not a pythonist, but you should use these methods for creating temporary files/directories
– skrat
See the tempfile module at docs.python.org/library/tempfile.html.
– Jordan Parmer
5 Answers
436
votes
That would be the tempfile module.
It has functions to get the temporary directory, and also has some shortcuts to create temporary files and directories in it, either named or unnamed.
Example:
import tempfile
print tempfile.gettempdir() # prints the current temporary directory
f = tempfile.TemporaryFile()
f.write('something on temporaryfile')
f.seek(0) # return to beginning of file
print f.read() # reads data back from the file
f.close() # temporary file is automatically deleted here
For completeness, here's how it searches for the temporary directory, according to the documentation:
- The directory named by the
TMPDIRenvironment variable. - The directory named by the
TEMPenvironment variable. - The directory named by the
TMPenvironment variable. - A platform-specific location:
- On RiscOS, the directory named by the
Wimp$ScrapDirenvironment variable. - On Windows, the directories
C:\TEMP,C:\TMP,\TEMP, and\TMP, in that order. - On all other platforms, the directories
/tmp,/var/tmp, and/usr/tmp, in that order.
- On RiscOS, the directory named by the
- As a last resort, the current working directory.
70
votes
19
votes
I use:
from pathlib import Path
import platform
import tempfile
tempdir = Path("/tmp" if platform.system() == "Darwin" else tempfile.gettempdir())
This is because on MacOS, i.e. Darwin, tempfile.gettempdir() and os.getenv('TMPDIR') return a value such as '/var/folders/nj/269977hs0_96bttwj2gs_jhhp48z54/T'; it is one that I do not always want.
16
votes
The simplest way, based on @nosklo's comment and answer:
import tempfile
tmp = tempfile.mkdtemp()
But if you want to manually control the creation of the directories:
import os
from tempfile import gettempdir
tmp = os.path.join(gettempdir(), '.{}'.format(hash(os.times())))
os.makedirs(tmp)
That way you can easily clean up after yourself when you are done (for privacy, resources, security, whatever) with:
from shutil import rmtree
rmtree(tmp, ignore_errors=True)
This is similar to what applications like Google Chrome and Linux systemd do. They just use a shorter hex hash and an app-specific prefix to "advertise" their presence.
