mktemp(1) in /tmp or $PWD?

[Garrett Cooper]

On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 1:21 AM, Erik Trulsson <ertr1013 at student.uu.se> wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 10:27:40PM -0800, Doug Barton wrote:
>> On Thu, 25 Feb 2010, Garrett Cooper wrote:
>>
>> > So what I did was I wrote up a patch to be *I know... here it comes*
>> > more like GNU coreutils' copy of mktemp.
>>
>> What's the motivation for this? I'm a little confused about why we'd
>> want to change this when the -t option already exists. Also, does POSIX
>> say anything about what the default should be?
>
> POSIX does not define the mktemp(1) utility as far as I can tell, and
> thus says nothing about the default.
>
> The HISTORY section in the manpage says that mktemp(1) originated with
> OpenBSD so if anything it is the OpenBSD implementation that ought to
> be used as a reference.
>
> If the GNU implementation behaves differently, then I would say it is
> likely the GNU version which is wrong.

I'm not going to get into that bikeshed topic.

I'm not arguing about what's right or wrong -- I just prefer not
dealing with quirks between different systems, like having to type
`find .' instead of just `find', which searches $PWD first with
coreutil's find, or having to type the entry in fstab exactly when
doing a mount or unmount because the directory isn't properly
abspath'ed.

FreeBSD is a great system; if there are ways that I can possibly make
it better by adding smart defaults I will propose them wherever I
possibly can, because if I've thought of something, I'm pretty sure
I'm not the first one to have thought of it.

Thanks,
-Garrett