How to create a temporary directory in C++?

Question

I'm writing a function in C++ which creates a temporary directory. Such function should be as most portable as possible, e.g. it should work under linux, mac and win32 environments. How do I achieve that?

Answer 1

mkstemp(char *template)

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/cgi-bin/manpage?3+mkstemp

Answer 2

Check the mkdtemp function here.

Answer 3

There's no standard function to do this, so you'll need to compile different implementations for each platform you target.

On Windows, for example, you should use the temp directory, which can be obtained by a call to GetTempPath().

Answer 4

Boost's Filesystem library provides platform-independent directory functions. It will increase your program size a bit, but using Boost is often better (and often easier) than rolling your own.

http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_43_0/libs/filesystem/doc/index.htm