Thursday, April 12, 2007

Good temporary files in Ant

I was reading this nice post on unsigning jars with Ant when this line caught my eye:

<tempfile destdir="${java.io.tmpdir}"
          prefix="unsign-"
          property="temp.file"/>

I was struck by an Aha! moment—using ${java.io.tmpdir} is clearly the Right Thing for creating temporary files in Java. Why not also in Ant?

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2 comments:

  1. Brian Duff4/16/2007 10:48 PM

    Well... it would be nice if your "clean" target (or whatever) also deleted any temporary files that were created via your build, and that's something that's more easily done if you use a location that you can just mass-delete on clean (which java.io.tmpdir is not).

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  2. Brian Oxley4/17/2007 6:00 AM

    Agreed.

    What I would likely do is actually make a directory underneath java.io.tmpdir and use that.

    Of course, in shell I have mktemp available for that task (or in C/C++ as well) which handles race condition issues, etc.

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