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Chances are that every system this script runs on has "mktemp," and trapping exit makes it easy to clean up when things are finished.

https://www.mktemp.org/manual.html

http://redsymbol.net/articles/bash-exit-traps/

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Yep, makes it much simpler to write scripts like this https://github.com/psypete/public-bin/blob/public-bin/src/st... (run an application that's stored in git, but in a temp working directory, and clean up after)

But, how can I make super sure some combination of my mistakes, undefined variables, failed cd commands, race conditions, etc, can't lead to me clearing the wrong directory.

I'm sure this is excessive paranoia, but I have never been confident to release a script that classes a directory, I'm to worked about things like subtle differences in how mktemp works on linux and mac for example.

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