Andreas Jaeger <aj(a)suse.de&gt; writes: Oops.. I forgot that on the linux machine I was one we use the Redhat CVS package. It uses mktemp too (which won't work on Solaris). There are some writeups on how to do this portably. The debian folk have one, I'l try finding it [time passes] I seem to have mistaken on the existence of write-ups. The best portable solution seems to be.. umask 077 tmpdir=${TMPDIR-/tmp}/foo.$$ mkdir $tmpdir || exit 1 trap "rm -rf $tmpdir; exit" 0 1 2 3 15 but that is still insecure on some platforms... Maybe we should simply ship mktemp? Maybe we should snarf the FSF 20.4 version in the same process at the same time. Jan