Temporary file path using swift

Question

How to get a unique temporary file path using Swift/Cocoa on OS X? Cocoa does not seem to provide a function for this, only NSTemporaryDirectory() which returns the path of the temporary directory. Using the BSD mktemp function requires a mutable C-string as argument.

Answer 1

Here is a possible method to use mkstemp() from Swift 3 and later. URL methods are used to convert between URL instances and C strings representing the file system path:

// The template string:
let template = URL(fileURLWithPath: NSTemporaryDirectory()).appendingPathComponent("file.XXXXXX") as NSURL

// Fill buffer with a C string representing the local file system path. 
var buffer = [Int8](repeating: 0, count: Int(PATH_MAX))
template.getFileSystemRepresentation(&buffer, maxLength: buffer.count)

// Create unique file name (and open file):
let fd = mkstemp(&buffer)
if fd != -1 {

    // Create URL from file system string:
    let url = URL(fileURLWithFileSystemRepresentation: buffer, isDirectory: false, relativeTo: nil)
    print(url.path)

} else {
    print("Error: " + String(cString: strerror(errno)))
}

---

Older code for Swift 2:

// The template string:
let template = NSURL(fileURLWithPath: NSTemporaryDirectory()).URLByAppendingPathComponent("file.XXXXXX")

// Fill buffer with a C string representing the local file system path. 
var buffer = [Int8](count: Int(PATH_MAX), repeatedValue: 0)
template.getFileSystemRepresentation(&buffer, maxLength: buffer.count)

// Create unique file name (and open file):
let fd = mkstemp(&buffer)
if fd != -1 {

    // Create URL from file system string:
    let url = NSURL(fileURLWithFileSystemRepresentation: buffer, isDirectory: false, relativeToURL: nil)
    print(url.path!)

} else {
    print("Error: " + String(strerror(errno)))
}