Question

Is there a standard and reliable way of creating a temporary directory inside a Java application? There’s an entry in Java’s issue database, which has a bit of code in the comments, but I wonder if there is a standard solution to be found in one of the usual libraries (Apache Commons etc.) ?

Answer 1

If you are using JDK 7 use the new Files.createTempDirectory class to create the temporary directory.

Path tempDirWithPrefix = Files.createTempDirectory(prefix); 

Before JDK 7 this should do it:

public static File createTempDirectory()     throws IOException {     final File temp;      temp = File.createTempFile('temp', Long.toString(System.nanoTime()));      if(!(temp.delete()))     {         throw new IOException('Could not delete temp file: ' + temp.getAbsolutePath());     }      if(!(temp.mkdir()))     {         throw new IOException('Could not create temp directory: ' + temp.getAbsolutePath());     }      return (temp); } 

You could make better exceptions (subclass IOException) if you want.