Robert Ramey wrote:
Guillaume Melquiond wrote:
I see the serialization library uses "tmpnam" quite a lot. I don't know what the status of this function is on other operating system. But on GNU/Linux at least (and I suppose it is the same for any POSIX system), it is considered to be bad practice [1]. Such a bad practice that the linker ld is especially programed to complain whenever somebody uses this function. Moreover, I see that Borland and Microsoft compilers "have brain->dead tmpnam functions" [2] so a replacement was needed.
So it may be a good idea to completely remove the function "tmpnam" from the Serialization library and use a saner replacement instead. This way, the library tests would compile without any complaint from the linker on Linux.
I need this functionality to run the tests. What is the best way to go about it?
The main danger of tmpnam is not that someone else may use the name, since a new unique name is returned each time, but rather that one may not have the rights to create a file in the current directory. Under Windows you could try: 1) tmpnam 2) _tempnam for compilers which support it ( both VC++ and C++ Builder do ) 3) GetTempPath followed by GetTempFileName, both Windows APi functions I don't see any mkstemp under Windows. It would be nice if the filesystem library had a way of creating a temporary file.