How do I create a named temporary file on windows in Python?

Question

I've got a Python program that needs to create a named temporary file which will be opened and closed a couple times over the course of the program, and should be deleted when the program exits. Unfortunately, none of the options in tempfile seem to work:

• TemporaryFile doesn't have a visible name
• NamedTemporaryFile creates a file-like object. I just need a filename. I've tried closing the object it returns (after setting delete = False) but I get stream errors when I try to open the file later.
• SpooledTemporaryFile doesn't have a visible name
• mkstemp returns both the open file object and the name; it doesn't guarantee the file is deleted when the program exits
• mktemp returns the filename, but doesn't guarantee the file is deleted when the program exits

I've tried using mktemp¹ within a context manager, like so:

def get_temp_file(suffix):
    class TempFile(object):
        def __init__(self):
            self.name = tempfile.mktemp(suffix = '.test')

        def __enter__(self):
            return self

        def __exit__(self, ex_type, ex_value, ex_tb):
            if os.path.exists(self.name):
                try:
                    os.remove(self.name)
                except:
                    print sys.exc_info()

     return TempFile()

... but that gives me a WindowsError(32, 'The process cannot access the file because it is being used by another process'). The filename is used by a process my program spawns, and even though I ensure that process finishes before I exit, it seems to have a race condition out of my control.

What's the best way of dealing with this?

¹ I don't need to worry about security here; this is part of a testing module, so the most someone nefarious could do is cause our unit tests to spuriously fail. The horror!

Answer 1

If you don't care about the security what is wrong with this?

tmpfile_name = tempfile.mktemp()
# do stuff
os.unlink(tmpfile_name)

You might be trying to over-engineer this. If you want to make sure that this file is always removed when the program exits, you could wrap your main() execution in a try/finally. Keep it simple!

if __name__ == '__main__':
    try:
        tmpfile_name = tempfile.mktemp()
        main()
    except Whatever:
        # handle uncaught exception from main()
    finally:
        # remove temp file before exiting
        os.unlink(tmpfile_name)

Answer 2

I have had exactly the same problem when I needed to save an uploaded file to the opened temporary file using the csv module. The most irritating thing was that the filename in WindowsError pointed to the temporary file, but saving the uploading file contents into the StringIO buffer and pushing the buffer data into the temporary file fixed the problem. For my needs that was enough since uploaded files always fit in memory.

The problem was only when I uploaded a file with a script through Apache's CGI, when I ran the similar script from console I could not reproduce the problem though.