Re: mktemp and suffixes

[Nuno J. Silva]

Bob Proulx <bob@proulx.com> writes:

> Nuno J. Silva wrote:
>> In a BASH script I'm writing, I need temporary files. Unfortunately, not
>> only some of the used programs don't accept stdin nor stdout, but they
>> also require "extensions" on the input/output file.
>
> Yep.  A common problem.
>
>> As I want to be sure nothing is overwritten, I tried calling mktemp with
>> a modified template:
>> 
>> $ mktemp tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.ext
>> mktemp: too few X's in template `tmp.XXXXXXXXXX.ext'
[...]
>> Is this a limitation of mktemp (X's must be on the right)?
>
> Yes.  It is a legacy limitation.  As Jim mentioned a feature for this
> was recently added to GNU coreutils.
>
> The traditional way to handle this problem was to create a temporary
> directory and then create files with suffixes inside the directory.
> Because the directory is uniquely named you can use a known name for
> the file within the directory.

I changed it so for now it does exactly that - it's way better than the
(ugly) way I was doing it (appending the suffix to the random name and
aboting because it hit an existing file).

-- 
Thanks,
Nuno J. Silva
gopher://sdf-eu.org/1/users/njsg