Comment by wpollock
1 day ago
> In general, I find it unacceptable for programs to use (anywhere in) my file system, besides /tmp, as a dumping ground for their caches and downloads, without cleaning it up.
/tmp must be world-writable and for multi-user or multi-tenant systems it becomes a security hole. Storing temporary files in the current user's home directory (or a subdirectory thereof) makes sense.
What doesn't make sense is this blog post about TMP and TEMP, and ending with "I don't know why" (in different words).
The reason is simple: different programmers thought the other name was bad. They were under no obligation to come to a consensus.
Don't forget about TEMPDIR and TMPDIR! Also Windows has its own environment variables for this. But generally, Linux software ported to Windows still use TMP or TEMP.
> /tmp must be world-writable and for multi-user or multi-tenant systems it becomes a security hole. Storing temporary files in the current user's home directory (or a subdirectory thereof) makes sense.
It makes sense when it's a user option. If /tmp isn't an option due to security concerns, then use $CWD by default. I can always alter the config to some other location if I do not like it. With the amount of programs that litter $HOME, especially with caches, you have to whitelist directories when backing it up. With a naive rsync, you'll find half your transfer is junk.