volatile

volatile

Temporary files and directories.

Contains replacement for tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile that does not delete the file on close(), but still unlinks it after the context manager ends, as well as a mkdtemp-based temporary directory implementation.

• Mostly reuses the stdlib implementations, supporting the same signatures.
• Due to that, uses the OS's built-in temporary file facilities, no custom schemes.
• Tested on Python 2.6+ and 3.3+

Usage

A typical use-case that is not possible with the regular NamedTemporaryFile:

.. code-block:: python

import volatile

with volatile.file() as tmp:
    # tmp behaves like a regular NamedTemporaryFile here, except for that
    # it gets unlinked at the end of the context manager, instead of when
    # close() is called.

    tmp.close()

    # run the users $EDITOR
    run_editor(tmp.name)

    buf = open(tmp.name).read()

    # ...

Temporary directories:

.. code-block:: python

import volatile

with volatile.dir(): as dtmp:
    pass  # ... can use directory here

# a missing dtmp will not throw an exception!

Unix domain sockets:

.. code-block:: python

import volatile

with volatile.unix_socket(): as (sock, addr):
    # sock is the bound socket, addr its address on the filesystem
    pass  # ... can use directory here

The source is fairly short and contains API docs in the comments <https://github.com/mbr/volatile/blob/master/volatile/__init__.py>_.