Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

Named temporary files

Usually when working with temporary files, we don't care where they are stored. We need to create them, store some content there, and get rid of them when we are done. Most of the time, we use temporary files when we want to store something that is too big to fit in memory, but sometimes you need to be able to provide a file to another tool or software, and a temporary file is a great way to avoid the need to know where to store such a file.

In that situation, we need to know the path that leads to the temporary file so that we can provide it to the other tool.

That's where tempfile.NamedTemporaryFile can help. Like all other tempfile forms of temporary files, it will be created for us and will be deleted automatically ...