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NAME | LIBRARY | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUE | ERRORS | ATTRIBUTES | STANDARDS | HISTORY | BUGS | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON |
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mktemp(3) Library Functions Manual mktemp(3)
mktemp - make a unique temporary filename
Standard C library (libc, -lc)
#include <stdlib.h>
char *mktemp(char *template);
Feature Test Macro Requirements for glibc (see
feature_test_macros(7)):
mktemp():
Since glibc 2.12:
(_XOPEN_SOURCE >= 500) && ! (_POSIX_C_SOURCE >= 200112L)
|| /* glibc >= 2.19: */ _DEFAULT_SOURCE
|| /* glibc <= 2.19: */ _SVID_SOURCE || _BSD_SOURCE
Before glibc 2.12:
_BSD_SOURCE || _SVID_SOURCE || _XOPEN_SOURCE >= 500
Never use this function; see BUGS.
The mktemp() function generates a unique temporary filename from
template. The last six characters of template must be XXXXXX and
these are replaced with a string that makes the filename unique.
Since it will be modified, template must not be a string constant,
but should be declared as a character array.
The mktemp() function always returns template. If a unique name
was created, the last six bytes of template will have been
modified in such a way that the resulting name is unique (i.e.,
does not exist already) If a unique name could not be created,
template is made an empty string, and errno is set to indicate the
error.
EINVAL The last six characters of template were not XXXXXX.
For an explanation of the terms used in this section, see
attributes(7).
┌──────────────────────────────────────┬───────────────┬─────────┐
│ Interface │ Attribute │ Value │
├──────────────────────────────────────┼───────────────┼─────────┤
│ mktemp() │ Thread safety │ MT-Safe │
└──────────────────────────────────────┴───────────────┴─────────┘
None.
4.3BSD, POSIX.1-2001. Removed in POSIX.1-2008.
Never use mktemp(). Some implementations follow 4.3BSD and
replace XXXXXX by the current process ID and a single letter, so
that at most 26 different names can be returned. Since on the one
hand the names are easy to guess, and on the other hand there is a
race between testing whether the name exists and opening the file,
every use of mktemp() is a security risk. The race is avoided by
mkstemp(3) and mkdtemp(3).
mktemp(1), mkdtemp(3), mkstemp(3), tempnam(3), tmpfile(3),
tmpnam(3)
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-6.15.tar.gz
fetched from
⟨https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/docs/man-pages/⟩ on
2025-08-11. 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
man-pages@man7.org
Linux man-pages 6.15 2025-05-17 mktemp(3)
Pages that refer to this page: mktemp(1), mkdtemp(3), mkstemp(3), pmrecord(3), stdio(3), tempnam(3), tmpfile(3), tmpnam(3)
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HTML rendering created 2025-09-06 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface. For details of in-depth Linux/UNIX system programming training courses that I teach, look here. Hosting by jambit GmbH. |
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