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shellposixportabilitytemporary-filessecure-coding

How to create a temporary file with portable shell in a secure way?

I want to create a temporary file in POSIX shell (/bin/sh).

I found out that mktemp(1) doens't exist on my AIX box, and according to How portable is mktemp(1)?, it isn't that portable and/or secure anyway.

So, what should I use instead ?

Solution

  • Why not use /dev/random?

    It could be neater with perl but od and awk will do, something like:

    tempfile=XXX-$(od -N4 -tu /dev/random | awk 'NR==1 {print $2} {}')