[Python-Dev] Remove tempfile.mktemp() (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Tue Mar 19 09:51:27 EDT 2019

On Wed, 20 Mar 2019 00:37:56 +1100 Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:

On Wed, Mar 20, 2019 at 12:25 AM Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote: > > > -1. Please don't remove tempfile.mktemp(). mktemp() is useful to > create a temporary name. All other tempfile functions create an > actual file and impose additional burden, for example by making the > file unaccessible by other processes. But sometimes all I want is a > temporary name that an other program will create / act on, not Python. > It's a very common use case when writing scripts. > > The only reasonable workaround I can think of is to first create a > temporary directory using mkdtemp(), then use a well-known name inside > that directory. But that has the same security implications AFAICT, > since another process can come and create the file / symlink first.

Can't you create a NamedTemporaryFile and permit the other program to use it? I just tried that (with TiMidity, even though it's quite capable of just writing to stdout) and it worked fine.

Does it always work? According to the docs, """Whether the name can be used to open the file a second time, while the named temporary file is still open, varies across platforms (it can be so used on Unix; it cannot on Windows NT or later)""".

tempfile.mktemp() is portable.

Regards

Antoine.

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