Creating a Temporary Directory

So far, we’ve created permanent entries in the file system. For various reasons like parking data temporarily it can be necessary to just have a temporary directory. The tempfile module contains methods that handle such cases in a safe and consistent way.

Listing 5 shows an example that uses the TemporaryDirectory() method in combination with the with statement. After the with statement the temporary directory does not exist anymore because both the directory, and its contents have been entirely removed.

import tempfile

# create a temporary directory
with tempfile.TemporaryDirectory() as directory:
    print('The created temporary directory is %s' % directory)

# directory and its contents have been removed by this point