What happened to the TMP environment variable?

bash tmp
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.

Related questions

How to concatenate string variables in Bash

In PHP, strings are concatenated together as follows: $foo = "Hello"; $foo .= " World"; Here, $foo becomes "Hello World". How is this accomplished in Bash?

Read More
How can I check if a directory exists in a Bash shell script?

What command can be used to check if a directory exists or not, within a Bash shell script?

Read More
How do I tell if a regular file does not exist in Bash?

I've used the following script to see if a file exists: #!/bin/bash FILE=$1 if [ -f $FILE ]; then echo "File $FILE exists." else echo "File $FILE does not exist." fi What's the correct syntax to use if I only want …

Read More