Re: TEMP vs TMP

On Sun, 28 Aug 2005 19:59:58 GMT, Paul Emmons <pemmons@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

>I've heard that two environment variables, TEMP and TMP, should be set
>to one or two subdirectories that can be used for temporary files.
>
>This recommendation goes back many years, as I recall. On my XP
>machine, these two variables have been automatically set to the same
>subdirectory. On an older machine of mine, my autoexec.bat sets TEMP
>to a subdirectory of a RAM disk, and TMP is not set.
>
>Why are there two environment variables for this purpose? Is there
>any difference between them in how various programs use them? What
>can go wrong if one or both of these variables are not set?
>

Programs that have a purely Microsoft linage, TEMP is used. Anything
having Unix in it's history, or in the mindset of its author, is
likely to use TMP. C compilers tend to use TMP because C is the
universal language, and it had its origin with Unix (Unix uses TMP
because C does, not the other way around (I think, but since C was
written for the purpose of writing Unix, the two are intimately and
inseparability intertwined)).

I suspect MS chose TEMP rather than TMP for much the same reason they
chose / instead of - to mark command line switches (that, incidently
is why MS file systems use \ instead of / as directory separators - /
was already taken).

--
T.E.D. (tdavis@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx)
.

Relevant Pages

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