Wilfredo Sanchez wrote: > > I'm on the side that env vars appropriate to the platform should be > honored. But note that BSD Unix and I think POSIX do not dictate such > a variable. TMPDIR, if used, is used at the discretion of > applications, not by the system per-se, though it's not uncommon for > system applications to do so. <paths.h> defines _PATH_TMP, which we > should use. Beware this includes the trailing slash, which I think is > more of a bother than a help, but whatever. >
But _PATH_TMP is compile time, whereas TMPDIR is runtime, IIRC. I would say we can support both (use _PATH_TMP for each OS to pick the default, but allow that to be overridden at runtime with TMPDIR). > A note on /var/tmp: On BSD systems, you have both /tmp and /var/tmp. > The difference is that /var/tmp tends to be longer-lived (files that > haven't been accessed in n days get deleted by periodic tasks, n is > sometimes larger for /var/tmp), and, unlike /tmp, is not wiped on > reboot. /var/tmp is generally used by system software, but also by > editors for backup files (which you'd like to find even if your system > crashed). See hier(7). Don't know about System V conventions for > that. Anyway, on BSD, I think we want /tmp, not /var/tmp for the > default. > Also, I think, that several Un*xes have /tmp as a memory based directory but not so much with /var/tmp. I think that /tmp is almost as much a given as /dev/null :) -- =========================================================================== Jim Jagielski [|] [EMAIL PROTECTED] [|] http://www.jaguNET.com/ "A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both and deserve neither" - T.Jefferson
