Environment variable to control java.io.tmpdir?

java configuration environment-variables temp
Zach Hirsch picture Zach Hirsch · Dec 17, 2009 · Viewed 301k times · Source

I've used the TMP environment variable to control things like where gcc writes it's temporary files, but I can't seem to find an equivalent for java's createTempFile API.

Does such an environment variable exist?

Answer

Bryan Kyle picture Bryan Kyle · Dec 17, 2009

According to the java.io.File Java Docs

The default temporary-file directory is specified by the system property java.io.tmpdir. On UNIX systems the default value of this property is typically "/tmp" or "/var/tmp"; on Microsoft Windows systems it is typically "c:\temp". A different value may be given to this system property when the Java virtual machine is invoked, but programmatic changes to this property are not guaranteed to have any effect upon the the temporary directory used by this method.

To specify the java.io.tmpdir System property, you can invoke the JVM as follows:

java -Djava.io.tmpdir=/path/to/tmpdir

By default this value should come from the TMP environment variable on Windows systems

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