062-tempfile.md

Temporary Files And Folders

Operating systems generally offer a special location for temporary files and folders. Python's builtin tempfile module offers a platform-independent way to find and use these:

import tempfile
from pathlib import Path

# Platform-independent temporary folder and file
_, file = tempfile.mkstemp(suffix=".log")
file = Path(file)                     # e.g. /tmp/tmp1wyp7b2n.log
folder = Path(tempfile.gettempdir())  # e.g. /tmp
assert file.parent == folder

file.write_text("Hire me!")
file.unlink()  # Delete when done

By creating the file manually, we are also responsible for deleting it manually (hence file.unlink()). If we are interested in keeping this file around during runtime only, we can use the context manager:

with tempfile.TemporaryFile() as fd:
    fd.write(b"https://ariel.ninja")
    fd.seek(0)
    print(fd.read().decode())

The tempfile module also has corresponding functionality for temporary directories. Check out the documentation for details.

References: https://docs.python.org/3/library/tempfile.html