Text Processing with Ruby

Temporary Files

Sometimes, when writing to a file, we don’t care about the data sticking around. We just want it to be there for the duration of our script’s execution, after which it can safely be discarded.

The reasons for doing this are many. We might be using a library that needs to read from a file, but have data in memory. In this case, we can write the data to a temporary file and then pass that file into our library’s code. We might be dealing with data that’s too big to fit in memory but that won’t ultimately be written to the filesystem—buffering an upload before passing it to another service, for example.

On the face of it, the problem seems like a very simple one, and it’s tempting to create our own solution for it. All we need to ...