FAQ 5.7 How do I make a temporary file name?

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5.7: How do I make a temporary file name?

If you don't need to know the name of the file, you can use "open()"
with "undef" in place of the file name. In Perl 5.8 or later, the
"open()" function creates an anonymous temporary file:

open my $tmp, '+>', undef or die $!;

Otherwise, you can use the File::Temp module.

use File::Temp qw/ tempfile tempdir /;

my $dir = tempdir( CLEANUP => 1 );
($fh, $filename) = tempfile( DIR => $dir );

# or if you don't need to know the filename

my $fh = tempfile( DIR => $dir );

The File::Temp has been a standard module since Perl 5.6.1. If you don't
have a modern enough Perl installed, use the "new_tmpfile" class method
from the IO::File module to get a filehandle opened for reading and
writing. Use it if you don't need to know the file's name:

use IO::File;
my $fh = IO::File->new_tmpfile()
or die "Unable to make new temporary file: $!";

If you're committed to creating a temporary file by hand, use the
process ID and/or the current time-value. If you need to have many
temporary files in one process, use a counter:

BEGIN {
use Fcntl;
my $temp_dir = -d '/tmp' ? '/tmp' : $ENV{TMPDIR} || $ENV{TEMP};
my $base_name = sprintf "%s/%d-%d-0000", $temp_dir, $$, time;

sub temp_file {
my $fh;
my $count = 0;
until( defined(fileno($fh)) || $count++ > 100 ) {
$base_name =~ s/-(\d+)$/"-" . (1 + $1)/e;
# O_EXCL is required for security reasons.
sysopen $fh, $base_name, O_WRONLY|O_EXCL|O_CREAT;
}

if( defined fileno($fh) ) {
return ($fh, $base_name);
}
else {
return ();
}
}

}



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