Coding May 2, 2026 2 min read Hacker News (Top) EN

Why are there both TMP and TEMP environment variables? (2015)

A long-standing anomaly in Unix-like systems has been exposed, revealing that both TMP and TEMP environment variables serve distinct purposes, with TMP typically used by the C standard library and TEMP employed by the Bourne shell and its derivatives, highlighting a historical divergence in implementation that persists to this day. This dichotomy has implications for developers working across different platforms and languages. The coexistence of these variables underscores the complexities of legacy system evolution. AI-assisted, human-reviewed.

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Article URL: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20150417-00/?p=44213 Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47984522 Points: 26 # Comments: 9

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