Practical UNIX

Choosing the Destination

In this chapter, the concepts of absolute and relative pathnames are very important. You can review them in Chapter 3, if needed. That chapter also discusses standard directories found on most UNIX systems. In that discussion, /tmp was mentioned as a directory for temporary files. This is a good directory for users to use when they want to build a few small temporary files (also called scratch files).

Because all users can build files in /tmp, choose a name for your file that is not likely to be used by other users—include your logon ID as part of the name, for example. I usually add the word junk or tmp to such files. Whenever I later encounter files that I created with junk or tmp in the name, I can freely delete them ...