Creating temporary files with tempfile

You can create temporary files which has a visible name on the file system which can be accessed via the name property. The file can, on unix systems, be configured to delete on closure (set by delete param, default is True) or can be reopened later.

The following will create and open a named temporary file and write ‘Hello World!’ to that file. The path of the temporary file can be accessed via name, in this example it is saved to the variable path and printed for the user. The file is then re-opened after closing the file and the contents of the tempfile are read and printed for the user.

import tempfile

with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(delete=False) as t:
	t.write(‘Hello World!’) 
	path = t.name
	print path
	with open(path) as t:
	    print t.read()

Output:

/tmp/tmp6pireJ
Hello World!