Crate tempfile

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Expand description

Temporary files and directories.

  • Use the tempfile() function for temporary files
  • Use the tempdir() function for temporary directories.

Design

This crate provides several approaches to creating temporary files and directories. tempfile() relies on the OS to remove the temporary file once the last handle is closed. TempDir and NamedTempFile both rely on Rust destructors for cleanup.

When choosing between the temporary file variants, prefer tempfile unless you either need to know the file’s path or to be able to persist it.

Resource Leaking

tempfile will (almost) never fail to cleanup temporary resources, but TempDir and NamedTempFile will if their destructors don’t run. This is because tempfile relies on the OS to cleanup the underlying file, while TempDir and NamedTempFile rely on their destructors to do so.

Security

In the presence of pathological temporary file cleaner, relying on file paths is unsafe because a temporary file cleaner could delete the temporary file which an attacker could then replace.

tempfile doesn’t rely on file paths so this isn’t an issue. However, NamedTempFile does rely on file paths for some operations. See the security documentation on the NamedTempFile type for more information.

Early drop pitfall

Because TempDir and NamedTempFile rely on their destructors for cleanup, this can lead to an unexpected early removal of the directory/file, usually when working with APIs which are generic over AsRef<Path>. Consider the following example:

// Create a directory inside of `std::env::temp_dir()`.
let temp_dir = tempdir()?;

// Spawn the `touch` command inside the temporary directory and collect the exit status
// Note that `temp_dir` is **not** moved into `current_dir`, but passed as a reference
let exit_status = Command::new("touch").arg("tmp").current_dir(&temp_dir).status()?;
assert!(exit_status.success());

This works because a reference to temp_dir is passed to current_dir, resulting in the destructor of temp_dir being run after the Command has finished execution. Moving the TempDir into the current_dir call would result in the TempDir being converted into an internal representation, with the original value being dropped and the directory thus being deleted, before the command can be executed.

The touch command would fail with an No such file or directory error.

Examples

Create a temporary file and write some data into it:

use tempfile::tempfile;
use std::io::{self, Write};

// Create a file inside of `std::env::temp_dir()`.
let mut file = tempfile()?;

writeln!(file, "Brian was here. Briefly.")?;

Create a named temporary file and open an independent file handle:

use tempfile::NamedTempFile;
use std::io::{self, Write, Read};

let text = "Brian was here. Briefly.";

// Create a file inside of `std::env::temp_dir()`.
let mut file1 = NamedTempFile::new()?;

// Re-open it.
let mut file2 = file1.reopen()?;

// Write some test data to the first handle.
file1.write_all(text.as_bytes())?;

// Read the test data using the second handle.
let mut buf = String::new();
file2.read_to_string(&mut buf)?;
assert_eq!(buf, text);

Create a temporary directory and add a file to it:

use tempfile::tempdir;
use std::fs::File;
use std::io::{self, Write};

// Create a directory inside of `std::env::temp_dir()`.
let dir = tempdir()?;

let file_path = dir.path().join("my-temporary-note.txt");
let mut file = File::create(file_path)?;
writeln!(file, "Brian was here. Briefly.")?;

// By closing the `TempDir` explicitly, we can check that it has
// been deleted successfully. If we don't close it explicitly,
// the directory will still be deleted when `dir` goes out
// of scope, but we won't know whether deleting the directory
// succeeded.
drop(file);
dir.close()?;

Structs

  • Builder
    Create a new temporary file or directory with custom parameters.
  • NamedTempFile
    A named temporary file.
  • PathPersistError
    Error returned when persisting a temporary file path fails.
  • PersistError
    Error returned when persisting a temporary file fails.
  • SpooledTempFile
    An object that behaves like a regular temporary file, but keeps data in memory until it reaches a configured size, at which point the data is written to a temporary file on disk, and further operations use the file on disk.
  • TempDir
    A directory in the filesystem that is automatically deleted when it goes out of scope.
  • TempPath
    A path to a named temporary file without an open file handle.

Functions