Temporary folder
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
In computing, a temporary folder or temporary directory is a directory used to hold temporary files. Many operating systems and some software automatically delete the contents of this directory at bootup or at regular intervals, leaving the directory itself intact.
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For security reasons, it is best for each user to have their own temporary directory, since there has been a history of security vulnerabilities with temporary files due to programs incorrect file permissions or race conditions.
A standard procedure for system administration is to reduce the amount of storage space used (typically, on a disk drive) by removing temporary files. In multi-user systems, this can potentially remove active files, disrupting users' activities. To avoid this, some space-reclaiming procedures remove only files which are inactive or "old" - those which have not been read or modified in several days.
In Unix, the /tmp directory will often be a separate disk partition. In systems with magnetic hard disk drives, performance (overall system IOPS) will increase if disk-head movements from regular disk I/O are separated from the access to the temporary directory. Increasingly, memory-based solutions for the temporary directory or folder are being used, such as "RAM disks" set up in random-access memory or the shared-memory device /dev/shm in Linux.
A Flash-based solid-state drive is less suitable as a temporary-storage device for reading and writing due to the asymmetric read/write duration and due to wear. (See wear leveling.)
In MS-DOS and Microsoft Windows, the temporary directory is set by the environment variable TEMP or TMP.[1] Using the Window API, one can find the path to the temporary directory using the GetTempPath2 function,[2] or one can obtain a path to a uniquely-named temporary file using the GetTempFileName function.[3] Originally, the default was C:\Temp, then %WinDir%\Temp. In the Windows XP era, the temporary directory was set per-user as Local Settings\Temp, although still user-relocatable. For Windows Vista, 7, 8, and 10 the temp location has moved again to within the AppData section of the User Profile, typically C:\Users\User Name\AppData\Local\Temp (%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Temp). In all versions of Windows, the Temp location can be accessed, for example, in Explorer, "Run..." boxes and in an application's internal code by using %TMP% or %TEMP%. As with other environmental variables, %TMP% or %TEMP% is synonymous with the full path.
In Unix and Linux, the global temporary directories are /tmp and /var/tmp. Web browsers periodically write data to the tmp directory during page views and downloads. Typically, /var/tmp is for persistent files (as it may be preserved over reboots), and /tmp is for more temporary files. See Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.[4][5] In addition, a user can set their TMPDIR environment variable to point to a preferred directory (where the creation and modification of files is allowed).
In macOS, a sandboxed application cannot use the standard Unix locations, but may use a user-specific directory whose path is provided by the function NSTemporaryDirectory.[6]
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