Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

How to do it...

tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile will create the temporary file:

>>> from tempfile import NamedTemporaryFile
>>>
>>> with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile() as f:
...   print(f.name)
... 
/var/folders/js/ykgc_8hj10n1fmh3pzdkw2w40000gn/T/tmponbsaf34

The fact that the .name attribute leads to the full file path on disk allows us to provide it to other external programs:

>>> with tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile() as f:
...   os.system('echo "Hello World" > %s' % f.name)
...   f.seek(0)
...   print(f.read())
... 
0
0
b'Hello World\n'