Today, I was working on a script at work where I ultimately needed to export a 2MB file and although this isn’t a large file, I know I will forget about getting rid of it so while searching around, I came across tempfile.

Tempfile simply will be garbage collected at some time because the file is stored in /tmp and you can make your own copy if you need it. Here’s an example from the ruby docs:

require ‘tempfile’

file = Tempfile.new(‘foo’) file.path # => A unique filename in the OS’s temp directory,

e.g.: “/tmp/foo.24722.0”

This filename contains ‘foo’ in its basename.

file.write(“hello world”) file.rewind file.read # => “hello world” file.close file.unlink # deletes the temp file

Make sure to run file.unlink if you want it to be deleted right away.