Git difftool problem: unable to create temp-file

Question

I'm using git with Kaleidoscope configured as the difftool. It's been working fine for months. It was working a day or two ago as well. Today, when I tried doing a "git difftool", suddenly, git reports

fatal: unable to create temp-file: No such file or directory

Searching around on google suggested that this might be a directory permission problem in the local git repo. But the situation did not improve even after a recursive chown on the git repo.

Git-difftool documentation does not mention where it might be trying to create this temp file. Does anybody have any ideas on how to find this out?

Answer 1

As I commented, this kind of message depends usually on the value of the environment variable $TMPDIR.

In the OP's case:

$TMPDIR was set to something crazy "/private/tmp/PKInstallSandbox.W1I4ev/tmp".
After a bit of googling, this is apparently an known issue with an installer of an app (TotalTerminal).
It did a self update today, but I didn't figure it would actually break something.

Restoring $TMPDIR to a "sane" value (like /tmp or other MacOs-specific localtion) should fix the issue.