How to create a temporary directory?

Solution 1:

Use mktemp -d. It creates a temporary directory with a random name and makes sure that file doesn't already exist. You need to remember to delete the directory after using it though.

Solution 2:

For a more robust solution i use something like the following. That way the temp dir will always be deleted after the script exits.

The cleanup function is executed on the EXIT signal. That guarantees that the cleanup function is always called, even if the script aborts somewhere.

#!/bin/bash    

# the directory of the script
DIR="$( cd "$( dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" )" && pwd )"

# the temp directory used, within $DIR
# omit the -p parameter to create a temporal directory in the default location
WORK_DIR=`mktemp -d -p "$DIR"`

# check if tmp dir was created
if [[ ! "$WORK_DIR" || ! -d "$WORK_DIR" ]]; then
  echo "Could not create temp dir"
  exit 1
fi

# deletes the temp directory
function cleanup {      
  rm -rf "$WORK_DIR"
  echo "Deleted temp working directory $WORK_DIR"
}

# register the cleanup function to be called on the EXIT signal
trap cleanup EXIT

# implementation of script starts here
...

Directory of bash script from here.

Bash traps.

Solution 3:

My favorite one-liner for this is

cd $(mktemp -d)