I always heard that the proper way to find the temporary folder on a UNIX machine was to look at the TMP environment variable. When writing code that worked on Windows as well as Linux, I would check for TEMP and TMP.
Today, I discovered that my Ubuntu install does not have that environment variable at all.
I know it seems you can always count on /tmp being there to put your temporary files in, but I understood that TMP was the way the user could tell you to put the temporary files someplace else.
Is that still the case?
You are probably thinking of TMPDIR.
This variable shall represent a pathname of a directory made available for programs that need a place to create temporary files.