Question

I am creating temp files with File::Temp. My temp files are deleted automatically when the program exits normally. I expected the same to happen when my program is stopped with ctrl+c. It is not.

Here’s a simple program demonstrating my problem.

The desired behavior is this. How can I achieve it? I am on Linux.

• temp file is not deleted when closing the file handle (ok)
• temp file gets deleted when program exits normally (ok)
• temp file gets deleted when program exits with ctrl+c (not working)

.

#!/usr/bin/perl -l

use warnings; use strict;
use File::Temp qw(tempfile tmpfile);

my $fh = File::Temp->new;
close $fh;

-f "$fh" || die "$fh does not exist"; 
print "hit enter and the file will be deleted";
print "hit ctrl+c and it won't";
print "verify with ls $fh after program exits";
readline STDIN;

EDIT 1

I tested the behavior of tempfile. It seems to confirm that Linux supports what I am looking for (marking files as temp / unlinking open file). I seem to have idealized File::Temp somehow.

# program will die because os deletes tmpfile after close
my $fh = tempfile;
close $fh;
stat $fh || die;
readline STDIN;

Answer 1

To cause a Control_C keyboard interrupt to run your END block you will need to add a signal handler. Compare the behavior of:

perl -E 'END{say "END"};<STDIN>'

with:

perl -E '$SIG{INT}=sub{die};END{say "END"};<STDIN>'

From the perlmod

An END code block is executed as late as possible, that is, after perl has
finished running the program and just before the interpreter is being exited,
even if it is exiting as a result of a die() function. (But not if it's
morphing into another program via exec, or being blown out of the water by a
signal--you have to trap that yourself (if you can).)