Why does NamedTemporaryFile().write (without intermediate variable) result in "I/O operation on closed file"?

Question

I have the following script, which does the same thing twice, in very slightly different ways. The first works, the second does not:

#!/usr/bin/python
import tempfile

fhandle=tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(dir=".",delete=False)
fhandle.write("hello")

tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile(dir=".",delete=False).write("hello")

I get the follow error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./test.py", line 7, in <module>
     tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile().write("hello")
 ValueError: I/O operation on closed file

In my example script, I have put them together to show that the first one works. This does not affect the results, just points out that there is a difference.

Is this a bug in Python? Something weird about my machine? Expected behaviour? Correct behaviour? It looks like the object is being destroyed before the write().

Python 2.7.3 on Ubuntu 12.04.3 LTS

Answer 1

Correct answer (from both answers to this question, and further test): This is a bug.

I have raised a bug, which can be seen here: http://bugs.python.org/issue18879