What happened to the TMP environment variable?

boatcoder picture boatcoder · Mar 12, 2010 · Viewed 37.2k times · Source

I always heard that the proper way to find the temporary folder on a UNIX machine was to look at the TMP environment variable. When writing code that worked on Windows as well as Linux, I would check for TEMP and TMP.

Today, I discovered that my Ubuntu install does not have that environment variable at all.

I know it seems you can always count on /tmp being there to put your temporary files in, but I understood that TMP was the way the user could tell you to put the temporary files someplace else.

Is that still the case?

Answer

Alok Singhal picture Alok Singhal · Mar 12, 2010

You are probably thinking of TMPDIR.

This variable shall represent a pathname of a directory made available for programs that need a place to create temporary files.