[python] Cross-platform way of getting temp directory in Python

Is there a cross-platform way of getting the path to the temp directory in Python 2.6?

For example, under Linux that would be /tmp, while under XP C:\Documents and settings\[user]\Application settings\Temp.

I use:

from pathlib import Path
import platform
import tempfile

tempdir = Path("/tmp" if platform.system() == "Darwin" else tempfile.gettempdir())

This is because on MacOS, i.e. Darwin, tempfile.gettempdir() and os.getenv('TMPDIR') return a value such as '/var/folders/nj/269977hs0_96bttwj2gs_jhhp48z54/T'; it is one that I do not always want.

This should do what you want:

print tempfile.gettempdir()

For me on my Windows box, I get:

c:\temp

and on my Linux box I get:

/tmp

The simplest way, based on @nosklo's comment and answer:

import tempfile
tmp = tempfile.mkdtemp()

But if you want to manually control the creation of the directories:

import os
from tempfile import gettempdir
tmp = os.path.join(gettempdir(), '.{}'.format(hash(os.times())))
os.makedirs(tmp)

That way you can easily clean up after yourself when you are done (for privacy, resources, security, whatever) with:

from shutil import rmtree
rmtree(tmp, ignore_errors=True)

This is similar to what applications like Google Chrome and Linux systemd do. They just use a shorter hex hash and an app-specific prefix to "advertise" their presence.