[Python-Dev] Remove tempfile.mktemp()

[Guido van Rossum]

On Tue, Mar 19, 2019 at 6:27 AM Antoine Pitrou <solipsis at pitrou.net> wrote:

>
> -1.  Please don't remove tempfile.mktemp().  mktemp() is useful to
> create a temporary *name*.  All other tempfile functions create an
> actual file and impose additional burden, for example by making the
> file unaccessible by other processes.  But sometimes all I want is a
> temporary name that an *other* program will create / act on, not Python.
> It's a very common use case when writing scripts.
>
> The only reasonable workaround I can think of is to first create a
> temporary directory using mkdtemp(), then use a well-known name inside
> that directory.  But that has the same security implications AFAICT,
> since another process can come and create the file / symlink first.
>

If all you need is a random name, why not just use a random number
generator?
E.g. I see code like this:

    binascii.hexlify(os.urandom(8)).decode('ascii')

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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