Feature or enhancement

If you usetempfile.TemporaryDirectory(), the directory is automagically deleted, what is the whole purpose of this class. But sometimes you may want to take a look at it for debugging reasons, so it would be nice to have adelete=False to prevent deleting.

Pitch

Code using this could look like this:

importargparseimporttempfiledefmain():parser=argparse.ArgumentParser()parser.add_argument("--keep-temp-files",action="store_true",help="Don't delete temporary files")args=parser.parse_args()withtempfile.TemporaryDirectory(delete=notargs.keep_temp_files)astempdir:# Do somethingifargs.keep_temp_files:print(f"You can view your temporary files at{tempdir}")if__name__=="__main__":main()

I personal usetempfile.TemporaryDirectory() a lot, especial in build scripts. Sometimes a need to take a look at the content of these. so having this Option would be great for that.

Other ways to achieve this

Of course, there would be other ways to achieve this.

1. Use a extra function that takes the directory as argument:

ifargs.keep_temp_files:do_something("some/other/dir")else:withtempfile.TemporaryDirectory()astempdir:do_something(tempfile)

This would need some code rewrite.

2. Usinginput()

withtempfile.TemporaryDirectory()astempdir:# Do somethingifargs.keep_temp_files:print(f"You can view your temporary files at{tempdir}. Press enter to delete the files.")breakpoint()

This could cause problems in situations, where you can't easily give some Keyboard input to TTY.

3. Using a custom function

defmy_temp_dir(delet:bool=false):ifdelete:returntempfile.TemporaryDirectory()else:returnmy_custom_handler()

This will blow up your code when you just write a simple script. Python also often used by beginners, which may don't know, they can do this and start refactoring their code.

Why you should implement this

The argument can be easy added to exiting scripts if needed, without any additional work. A scripting language like Python should allow this to make debug more easy and more beginner friendly.

It is absolutely no work to implement this. If this would be much work to implement and maintain this, I would not suggested it. But in this case, it's just 3 steeps:

1. Take a additional argument in__init__():
2. Save is as class attribute
3. In__exit__() ask, if it should delete or not

Previous discussion

None

Linked PRs

• gh-100131: Add optional delete parameter to tempfile.TemporaryDirectory() #100132