Generating a temp filename in Bash

Here's a function that simplifies the process of generating temporary filenames in shell scripts (I use bash). This function will generate a temporary filename given optional path and filename prefix parameters. If the file happens to already exist (a small chance), it recurses to try a new filename.

It doesn't cleanup temp files or anything fancy like that, but it does have the behaviour that if you never write to the temp file, it is not created. If you don't like that idea, touch the file before returning the name.

This procedure demonstrates the use of variable expansion modifiers to parse the parameters, and the $RANDOM builtin variable.

function gettmpfile()
{
  local tmppath=${1:-/tmp}
  local tmpfile=$2${2:+-}
  tmpfile=$tmppath/$tmpfile$RANDOM$RANDOM.tmp
  if [ -e $tmpfile ]
  then
    # if file already exists, recurse and try again
    tmpfile=$(gettmpfile $1 $2)
  fi
  echo $tmpfile
}

By default (with no parameters specified), this function will return a random filename in the /tmp directory:

[prompt]$ echo $(gettmpfile)
/tmp/324003570.tmp

If you specify a path and filename prefix, these are used to generate the name:

[prompt]$ echo $(gettmpfile /my_tmp_path app-tmpfile)
/my_tmp_path/app-tmpfile-276051579.tmp

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Generating a temp filename in Bash