Shell – Where to save temporary files for shell scripts

scriptingshell

I have a script to toggle my screen backlight (mapped to a keyboard shortcut), and I want to save the brightness level so I can restore it when pressing the keyboard shortcut again.

Is there a standard place to save such files? Or should I just create some folder in my home directory to save them there?

I don't want to save them to /tmp because:

Programs must not assume that any files or directories in /tmp are preserved between invocations of the program.

Best Answer

On Linux, /run or /var/run are the standard places for things that are not required to survive a reboot, but mustn't be removed by e.g. tmpreaper. Daemons generally keep their pid files in there, for instance.

If your script runs as an ordinary user, then a dot-directory in that user's home directory is probably the right choice. That's where applications with persistent settings (e.g. Firefox, GIMP, etc) keep their data.

Related Solutions

Unix – How to Search Inside Zip Files

I once needed something similar to find class files in a bunch of zip files. Here it is:

#!/bin/bash

function process() {
while read line; do
    if [[ "$line" =~ ^Archive:\s*(.*) ]] ; then
        ar="${BASH_REMATCH[1]}"
        #echo "$ar"
    else
        if [[ "$line" =~ \s*([^ ]*abc\.jpg)$ ]] ; then
            echo "${ar}: ${BASH_REMATCH[1]}"
        fi
    fi
done
}


find . -iname '*.zip' -exec unzip -l '{}' \; | process

Now you only need to add one line to extract the files and maybe move them. I'm not sure exactly what you want to do, so I'll leave that to you.

Shell – Run shell scripts through a website

shbot is a very nice IRC bot used for the #bash Freenode channel. You can ask it to run Bash code for you:

/privmsg shbot echo test

It should be relatively easy to adapt this to work with a static web page.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Unix – How to Search Inside Zip Files

Shell – Run shell scripts through a website

Related Question