I would like to generate some temporary files in the course of my application. Specifically, I'm using AVAudioRecorder to record a file that I, upon stopping the recording, would like to load and edit/process. My question is:
What is the appropriate standard place to create temporary files. Is there some generally accepted approach to this for Mac or for iPad programming in general? I don't want to simply create a directory and write files into it if there is a proper protocol to this.
/tmp or /usr/tmp are the usual places to store temporary files in Unix (which Mac OS X and iOS are).
The usual place for applications to store temporary data is /var/tmp. You could also use /tmp but this directory is for system-generated temporary files and anything in /tmp is deleted when the machine reboots.
What I found was that according to the iOS Application Programming Guide, I am supposed to query for the appropriate temporary folder for my application via NSTemporaryDirectory(). I tried this and it returned a folder within the /var directory, in my case '/var/folders/pQ/pQ+ZqZCSHWSIHftcbIo57U+++TI/-Tmp-/'.
The answer to this question is actually a lot more complicated then one might assume. One cannot necessarily just use NSTemporaryDirectory and be done. I cocoadev.com has some good pages on this topic and I would suggest that you study them yourself and determine what will work best for your circumstance.
http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?NSTemporaryDirectory
http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?GettingTemporaryFolderOnSpecificVolume