How to create a tmp dir in node without collisions

Question

I have a need a create a temporary "scratch" directory on-demand in node.js. The requirements are:

• the dirname should be randomized (i.e. /tmp/aDIge4G/
• the directory will be created within /tmp which may already have other randomly named directories.
• if the directory already exists, I should throw rather than use it and overwrite someone else's work
• this needs to be safe in a concurrent environment. I can't just check if the directory exists and then create it if it doesn't because someone else may have created a directory with the same name after I checked.

In other words, I need the answer to this question but for directories, not files.

This answer says that what I want to do can be accomplished by mkdir -p, but Node doesn't have the -p flag for fs.mkdir

Answer 1

The current node api propose to create a temporary folder : https://nodejs.org/api/fs.html#fs_fs_mkdtemp_prefix_options_callback

which gives :

fs.mkdtemp(path.join(os.tmpdir(), 'foo-'), (err, folder) => {   if (err) throw err;   console.log(folder);   // Prints: /tmp/foo-itXde2 }); // folder /tmp/foo-itXde2 has been created on the file system