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

Sebastian Krause sebastian at realpath.org
Tue Mar 19 13:16:29 EDT 2019

Guido van Rossum <guido at python.org> wrote:

If all you need is a random name, why not just use a random number generator? E.g. I see code like this:

binascii.hexlify(os.urandom(8)).decode('ascii')

I tend to use os.path.join(dir, str(uuid.uuid4())) if I need to create a random filename to pass to another program. However, it would be nice to have a standard helper function that also allows me to specify a prefix and suffix. Shouldn't it be possible to just modify tempfile.mktemp() to generate much longer random filenames so that it is virtually impossible that another program has already created a file with the same name? Then the security problem is gone, there is no need to continue deprecating this function and all programs using it should continue to work.

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