redhat man page for mktemp

MKTEMP(1)						    BSD General Commands Manual 						 MKTEMP(1)

NAME
     mktemp -- make temporary file name (unique)

SYNOPSIS
     mktemp [-d] [-q] [-u] template

DESCRIPTION
     The mktemp utility takes the given file name template and overwrites a portion of it to create a file name.  This file name is unique and
     suitable for use by the application.  The template may be any file name with at least 6 of 'Xs' appended to it, for example /tmp/temp.XXXXXX.
     The trailing 'Xs' are replaced with the current process number and/or a unique letter combination.  The number of unique file names mktemp
     can return depends on the number of 'Xs' provided; six 'Xs' will result in mktemp testing roughly 26 ** 6 combinations.

     If mktemp can successfully generate a unique file name, the file is created with mode 0600 (unless the -u flag is given) and the filename is
     printed to standard output.

OPTIONS
     The available options are as follows:

     -d      Make a directory instead of a file.

     -q      Fail silently if an error occurs.	This is useful if a script does not want error output to go to standard error.

     -u      Operate in ``unsafe'' mode.  The temp file will be unlinked before mktemp exits.  This is slightly better than mktemp(3) but still
	     introduces a race condition.  Use of this option is not encouraged.

RETURN VALUES
     The mktemp utility exits with a value of 0 on success, and 1 on failure.

EXAMPLES
     The following sh(1) fragment illustrates a simple use of mktemp where the script should quit if it cannot get a safe temporary file.

	   TMPFILE=`mktemp /tmp/$0.XXXXXX` || exit 1
	   echo "program output" >> $TMPFILE

     In this case, we want the script to catch the error itself.

	   TMPFILE=`mktemp -q /tmp/$0.XXXXXX`
	   if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
		   echo "$0: Can't create temp file, exiting..."
		   exit 1
	   fi

     Note that one can also check to see that $TMPFILE is zero length instead of checking $?.  This would allow the check to be done later one in
     the script (since $? would get clobbered by the next shell command).

SEE ALSO
     mkstemp(3), mktemp(3)

HISTORY
     The mktemp utility appeared in OpenBSD.

BSD
								November, 20, 1996							       BSD