5.12. Creating Temporary Files

Some programs need to create temporary files that are used only while the program is running, and these files should be removed when the program terminates. For example, many compilers create temporary files during the compilation process. The GNU C library provides a range of library functions for this purpose. (The variety is, in part, a consequence of inheritance from various other UNIX implementations.) Here, we describe two of these functions: mkstemp() and tmpfile().

The mkstemp() function generates a unique filename based on a template supplied by the caller and opens the file, returning a file descriptor that can be used with I/O system calls.