What is the best way to interface with a a program that uses filenames on the command line for input and output?

Question

I need to interface with some executables that expect to be passed filenames for input or output:

./helper in.txt out.txt

What is the standard (and preferably cross-platform) way of doing this?

I could create lots of temporary files int the /tmp directory, but I am concerned that creating tons of files might cause some issues. Also, I want to be able to install my program and not have to worry about permissions later.

I could also just be Unix specific and try to go for a solution using pipes, etc. But then, I don't think I would be able to find a solution with nice, unnamed pipes.

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My alternative to this would be piping input to stdin (all the executables I need also accept it this way) and get the results from stdout. However, the outputs they give to stdout are all different and I would need to write lots of adapters by hand to make this uniform (the outputs through files obey a same standard). I don't like how this would lock in my program to a couple of formats though.

Answer 1

There isn't a right or wrong answer necessarily. Reading/writing to stdin/out is probably cleaner and doesn't use disk space. However, using temporary files is just fine too as long as you do it safely . Specifically, see the mktemp and mkstemp manual page for functions that let you create temporary files for short-term usage. Just clean them up afterward ( unlink ) and it's just fine to use and manipulate temp files.