:mod:`tempfile` --- Generate temporary files and directories

Source code: :source:`Lib/tempfile.py`

---

This module generates temporary files and directories. It works on all supported platforms. It provides three new functions, :func:`NamedTemporaryFile`, :func:`mkstemp`, and :func:`mkdtemp`, which should eliminate all remaining need to use the insecure :func:`mktemp` function. Temporary file names created by this module no longer contain the process ID; instead a string of six random characters is used.

Also, all the user-callable functions now take additional arguments which allow direct control over the location and name of temporary files. It is no longer necessary to use the global tempdir variable. To maintain backward compatibility, the argument order is somewhat odd; it is recommended to use keyword arguments for clarity.

The module defines the following user-callable items:

The module uses a global variable that tell it how to construct a temporary name. They are initialized at the first call to any of the functions above. The caller may change them, but this is discouraged; use the appropriate function arguments, instead.

Examples

Here are some examples of typical usage of the :mod:`tempfile` module:

>>> import tempfile

# create a temporary file and write some data to it
>>> fp = tempfile.TemporaryFile()
>>> fp.write(b'Hello world!')
# read data from file
>>> fp.seek(0)
>>> fp.read()
b'Hello world!'
# close the file, it will be removed
>>> fp.close()

# create a temporary file using a context manager
>>> with tempfile.TemporaryFile() as fp:
...     fp.write(b'Hello world!')
...     fp.seek(0)
...     fp.read()
b'Hello world!'
>>>
# file is now closed and removed

# create a temporary directory using the context manager
>>> with tempfile.TemporaryDirectory() as tmpdirname:
...     print('created temporary directory', tmpdirname)
>>>
# directory and contents have been removed