11.6. tempfile

Creates a temporary file in the most secure manner possible. There are no race conditions in the file’s creation, assuming that the platform properly implements the os.O_EXCL flag for os.open(). The file is readable and writable only by the creating user ID. If the platform uses permission bits to indicate whether a file is executable, the file is executable by no one. The file descriptor is not inherited by child processes.

Unlike TemporaryFile(), the user of mkstemp() is responsible for deleting the temporary file when done with it.

If suffix is specified, the file name will end with that suffix, otherwise there will be no suffix. mkstemp() does not put a dot between the file name and the suffix; if you need one, put it at the beginning of suffix.

If prefix is specified, the file name will begin with that prefix; otherwise, a default prefix is used.

If dir is specified, the file will be created in that directory; otherwise, a default directory is used. The default directory is chosen from a platform-dependent list, but the user of the application can control the directory location by setting the TMPDIR, TEMP or TMP environment variables. There is thus no guarantee that the generated filename will have any nice properties, such as not requiring quoting when passed to external commands via os.popen().

If text is specified, it indicates whether to open the file in binary mode (the default) or text mode. On some platforms, this makes no difference.

mkstemp() returns a tuple containing an OS-level handle to an open file (as would be returned by os.open()) and the absolute pathname of that file, in that order.