Using tempfile to create a sub-directory for all of my tempfiles

Question

I've been using tempfile.mkdtemp with a prefix to create my temp files. This results in a lot of different directory in my tmp folder with 'tmp/myprefix{uniq-string}/'.

I would like to change this and have a subdirectory so that my the temp folders I create are all under one main directory so that the prefix is actually a subfolder of tmp 'tmp/myprefix/{uniq-string}/'.

Also, I don't want to override tempfile's system for defining a default tmp directory.

I tried playing with the 'prefix' and 'dir' parameters but with no success.

Answer 1

To use the dir argument you have to ensure the dir folder exists. Something like this should work:

import os
import tempfile

#define the location of 'mytemp' parent folder relative to the system temp
sysTemp = tempfile.gettempdir()
myTemp = os.path.join(sysTemp,'mytemp')

#You must make sure myTemp exists
if not os.path.exists(myTemp):
    os.makedirs(myTemp)

#now make your temporary sub folder
tempdir = tempfile.mkdtemp(suffix='foo',prefix='bar',dir=myTemp)

print tempdir

Answer 2

Works for me. Did you create the tmp folder beforehand?

>>> import tempfile
>>> tempfile.mkdtemp(dir="footest", prefix="fixpre")
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'footest/fixpregSSaFg'

Looks like it does try to create a subfolder of footest....