Temporary Files And Directories in Ruby

Our first program will demonstrate how to work with temporary files and directories. Here’s the full source code:

require 'tempfile'
require 'fileutils'

def check(error)
  raise error if error
end

# The easiest way to create a temporary file is by using
# Tempfile.new. It creates a file and opens it for reading and writing.
f = Tempfile.new('sample')
puts "Temp file name: #{f.path}"

# Clean up the file after we're done. Ruby will automatically
# delete temporary files, but it's good practice to do this explicitly.
f.close
f.unlink

# We can write some data to the file.
f = Tempfile.new('sample')
f.write([1, 2, 3, 4].pack('C*'))
f.close

# If we intend to work with many temporary files, we may
# prefer to create a temporary directory.
# Dir.mktmpdir creates a temporary directory and returns its path.
Dir.mktmpdir('sampledir') do |dir|
  puts "Temp dir name: #{dir}"

  # Now we can create files in our temporary directory.
  file_path = File.join(dir, 'file1')
  File.write(file_path, [1, 2].pack('C*'))
end

To run the program:

$ ruby temporary_files_and_directories.rb
Temp file name: /tmp/sample20230615-12345-abcdef
Temp dir name: /tmp/sampledir20230615-12345-ghijkl

In this Ruby version:

We use the Tempfile class to create temporary files.
The Dir.mktmpdir method is used to create a temporary directory.
We use File.join to create file paths, similar to the original filepath.Join.
Ruby automatically cleans up temporary files and directories, but we still demonstrate explicit cleanup for good practice.
Instead of writing raw bytes, we use pack('C*') to convert an array of integers to a binary string.

This script demonstrates how to work with temporary files and directories in Ruby, which is useful for creating data that isn’t needed after the program exits.

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Temporary Files And Directories in Ruby