Courtesy of Planet Python , I stumbledover Peter Bengtsson's puzzlement with Python's tempfile module ,especially the mkstemp() function. It's an understandablepuzzlement, because what's going on is fairly tied to Unix semantics(although Python supports mkstemp() on all platforms).

The tempfile module's mkstemp() is a relatively thin shim over theUnix mkstemp(3) library routine, which exists to securely createtemporary files. This is more difficult than it looks; there are all

I've been doing various overhauls of DWiki recently (a faster andbetter DWikiText to HTML renderer written by Daniel Martin (and hackedby me, so blame me for any problems) went in tonight, for example).As part of this, I've been looking at the HTML DWiki generates,running it past HTML Tidy and the W3C validator and so on. It's been a learningexperience.

One of the things I've learned is that almost everywhere DWiki codeand templates were

It's always the little things about new Unix systems that get to me.Take $PATH on Solaris.

On a modern Linux distribution with a stock install, a sysadmin's full$PATH needs only five directories:

/bin /usr/bin /sbin /usr/sbin /usr/X11R6/bin

(Sometimes /usr/bin/X11 is used instead of /usr/X11R6/bin .)

On Solaris 9, my $PATH is