How to create a temporary directory?

Question

I use to create a tempfile, delete it and recreate it as a directory:

temp=`tempfile`
rm -f $temp
  # 
mkdir $temp

Answer 1

The following snippet will safely create a temporary directory (-d) and store its name into the TMPDIR. (An example use of TMPDIR variable is shown later in the code where it's used for storing original files that will be possibly modified.)

The first trap line executes exit 1 command when any of the specified signals is received. The second trap line removes (cleans up) the $TMPDIR on program's exit (both normal and abnormal). We initialize these traps after we check that mkdir -d succeeded to avoid accidentally executing the exit trap with $TMPDIR in an unknown state.

#!/bin/bash

# Create a temporary directory and store its name in a variable ...
TMPDIR=$(mktemp -d)

# Bail out if the temp directory wasn't created successfully.
if [ ! -e $TMPDIR ]; then
    >&2 echo "Failed to create temp directory"
    exit 1
fi

# Make sure it gets removed even if the script exits abnormally.
trap "exit 1"           HUP INT PIPE QUIT TERM
trap 'rm -rf "$TMPDIR"' EXIT

# Example use of TMPDIR:
for f in *.csv; do
    cp "$f" "$TMPDIR"
    # remove duplicate lines but keep order
    perl -ne 'print if ++$k{$_}==1' "$TMPDIR/$f" > "$f"
done