How to get TEMP folder path in PHP?

erie

Hi,

Does anyone know how to get the system temp folder path? I am looking for a function that will return something like "/tmp" or "C:\Windows\Temp".

Thanks.

tsinka

Hi,

this is sort of a hack but it should work (not every OS has an environment variable called TMP or TEMP):

<?PHP
$tmpfile = tempnam("dummy","");
$path = dirname($tmpfile);
echo $path;
unlink($tmpfile);
?>

When you use tempnam with a directory that doesn't exist (like e.g. dummy) PHP will create a temporary file in the system's default temporary directory and return the absolute path to the file. Extract the path information with dirname and you have the default temporary path.

Thomas

hstraf

Sorry to dig up an old thread, but this is exactly what I was looking for.

Do you know how reliable this is? ie: How many servers DO NOT have a temp folder system set up that could be utilized by php?

I'm trying to unzip a .zip file into a temp folder... but I'm running into permissions issues on safe_mode systems... so now I am trying to find a better solution.

(My thinking is to use whatever "temp" facility is offered by php...)

What do you think?

MarkR

Even when running with safe_mode or open_basedir in effect, the sensible* PHP administrator will have allowed you write access to a temporary directory somewhere. Even if it's a private one per-user.

Mark

This is something of an assumption 🙂

bradgrafelman

Temp directories are usually chmod'd to 777, are they not?

On my Windows server, here's the results:

echo tempnam(NULL, 'abc'); // \abcE9.tmp (in the root of my C:\)
echo tempnam('bradg', 'abc'); // C:\WINDOWS\TEMP\abcE9.tmp

On my Unix server...

echo tempnam(NULL, 'abc'); // /tmp/abc7jSD7o
echo tempnam('bradg3', 'abc'); // /tmp/abcAPLcG1