mkdtemp(3) — Linux manual page

NAME | LIBRARY | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUE | ERRORS | ATTRIBUTES | STANDARDS | HISTORY | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

mkdtemp(3)              Library Functions Manual              mkdtemp(3)

NAME         top

       mkdtemp - create a unique temporary directory

LIBRARY         top

       Standard C library (libc, -lc)

SYNOPSIS         top

       #include <stdlib.h>

       char *mkdtemp(char *template);

   Feature Test Macro Requirements for glibc (see
   feature_test_macros(7)):

       mkdtemp():
           /* Since glibc 2.19: */ _DEFAULT_SOURCE
               || /* glibc 2.19 and earlier: */ _BSD_SOURCE
               || /* Since glibc 2.10: */ _POSIX_C_SOURCE >= 200809L

DESCRIPTION         top

       The mkdtemp() function generates a uniquely named temporary
       directory from template.  The last six characters of template
       must be XXXXXX and these are replaced with a string that makes
       the directory name unique.  The directory is then created with
       permissions 0700.  Since it will be modified, template must not
       be a string constant, but should be declared as a character
       array.

RETURN VALUE         top

       The mkdtemp() function returns a pointer to the modified template
       string on success, and NULL on failure, in which case errno is
       set to indicate the error.

ERRORS         top

       EINVAL The last six characters of template were not XXXXXX.  Now
              template is unchanged.

       Also see mkdir(2) for other possible values for errno.

ATTRIBUTES         top

       For an explanation of the terms used in this section, see
       attributes(7).
       ┌─────────────────────────────────────┬───────────────┬─────────┐
       │ Interface                           Attribute     Value   │
       ├─────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────┼─────────┤
       │ mkdtemp()                           │ Thread safety │ MT-Safe │
       └─────────────────────────────────────┴───────────────┴─────────┘

STANDARDS         top

       POSIX.1-2008.

HISTORY         top

       glibc 2.1.91.  NetBSD 1.4.  POSIX.1-2008.

SEE ALSO         top

       mktemp(1), mkdir(2), mkstemp(3), mktemp(3), tempnam(3),
       tmpfile(3), tmpnam(3)

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of the man-pages (Linux kernel and C library
       user-space interface documentation) project.  Information about
       the project can be found at 
       ⟨https://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/⟩.  If you have a bug report
       for this manual page, see
       ⟨https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/docs/man-pages/man-pages.git/tree/CONTRIBUTING⟩.
       This page was obtained from the tarball man-pages-6.9.1.tar.gz
       fetched from
       ⟨https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/⟩ on
       2024-06-26.  If you discover any rendering problems in this HTML
       version of the page, or you believe there is a better or more up-
       to-date source for the page, or you have corrections or
       improvements to the information in this COLOPHON (which is not
       part of the original manual page), send a mail to
       [email protected]

Linux man-pages 6.9.1          2024-05-02                     mkdtemp(3)

Pages that refer to this page: mktemp(1)mkstemp(3)mktemp(3)file-hierarchy(7)