Question

Does PHP have a wrapper for UNIX tempfile? Or is it just tmpnam() that has atomicity problems like two calls at once accessing the function.

I would like to generate temp filenames on a large scale over many scripts. Any alternatives to tmpnam()?

Thanks!

[edit: meant tmpnam()]

Answer 1

No silver bullet, but 2 hacks :

You can call the function right from php :

<?php
$tempFileName = exec("mktemp -t $prefix");
?>

you can also use a recursive function like this (dirty, but should work :)) :

<?php
function tmpName($prefix, $path, $ext) {
    $name = (string)$prefix.getmypid().microtime(true).$ext;
    if (file_exists($path.'/'.$name)) {
        return tmpName($prefix, $path, $ext);
    } else {
        return $name;
    }
}
$tempFileName = tmpName('an arbitrary prefix','/tmp','.txt');   
?>