Re^2: Temp file strategy

[chb]

This is an interesting feature, but how can a user download such a file? If I understand perldoc -f open correctly, this syntax gives you a filehandle to an anonymous temporary file. Will you need some sort of streaming or some webserver trickery to let the user access this file from outside the perl script?

[blazar]

Indeed. But it depends on the OS you're under: I'm not really sure, but I think that Windows doesn't support real anonymous files, so the temporary file that you can see should still be there somewhere.

Here I'm under Linux and I get

$ strace -e open perl -e 'open $f, "+>", undef' 2>&1 | tail -n 1
open("/tmp/PerlIO_vfNALU", O_RDWR|O_CREAT|O_EXCL|O_LARGEFILE, 0600) = 
+3

but of course it is soon deleted:

$ perl -le 'open $f, "+>", undef;
print readlink "/proc/self/fd/" . fileno $f'
/tmp/PerlIO_vJg2Uf (deleted)

(or

$ perl -le 'open $f, "+>", undef;
print readlink "/proc/self/fd/" . fileno $f'
/tmp/.nfs0004821b00000353

if run on a machine where /tmp is mounted under nfs.)

Whatever, all this is at best fragile and tricky. This interesting open feature is best suited for a file to write stuff into, to recover it later. For your application any of the other suggestions you got would be probably preferable.

I just mentioned this temp file strategy option because IMHO it would deserve to be better known.