Use PowerShell to Create a Temporary File

The New-TemporaryFile cmdlet in PowerShell is used to create a temporary file easily. Creating a temp file in PowerShell is a common task when you want to store the data temporarily during the script execution.

In this article, we will discuss how to create a temp file in PowerShell using the New-TemporaryFile cmdlet.

Access the Temp Folder in PowerShell

In Windows, the operating system and application store the data temporarily in a temp folder. The system’s team folder path can be accessed using the environment variable $env:temp

$env:temp

The above PowerShell script gets the path of the current user’s temp folder as given below:

C:\Users\shelladmin\AppData\Local\Temp\

Now, let’s create a temporary file in the system temp folder.

PowerShell Create Temporary File using the New-TemporaryFile

PowerShell has a built-in cmdlet New-TemporaryFile that creates a temporary file with extension .tmp and stores it in the system’s temp folder.

$tempFile = New-TemporaryFile
$tempFile

In the above PowerShell script, the New-TemporaryFile cmdlet creates a temp file `tmp913E.tmp` and stores it in the temp folder location.

The output of the above script generates a unique file with an extension .tmp and displays file details as given below:

Create a Temporary File with a Custom Name and Extension

When working with data that needs to be stored temporarily during script execution, we need to create a temporary file with a custom name and extension. In PowerShell, it can be easily done using the following script:

# Access the temp folder path
$tempFolder = $env:Temp 

# Define Custom Name for file
$customFileName = "rabbitmq_log"

# Define custom extension for file
$extention = ".txt" 

# Join the file name with extension
$customTempFileName = $customFileName + $extention

# Join the system temp folder path with custom file name
$customTempFilePath = Join-Path -Path $tempFolder -ChildPath $customTempFileName 

# Create a temp file at system temp folder
$tempFile = [System.IO.FileInfo]::new($customTempFilePath) 
$tempFile.Create().Close() 

# Print the temporary file location
Write-Host "Temporary file created at: $($tempFile.FullName)"

The above PowerShell script creates a temporary file with a custom name and extension `rabbitmq_log.txt` in the system’s temp folder and print the file location as given below:

Temporary file created at: C:\Users\shellladmin\AppData\Local\Temp\rabbitmq_log.txt

Delete Windows Temporary Files

It’s important to clean up temporary files after they are no longer needed.

Use the Remove-Item cmdlet in PowerShell to remove a temporary file.

$tempFile = "C:\Users\shelladmin\AppData\Local\Temp\rabbitmq_log.txt" 
Remove-Item -Path $tempFile.FullName -Force

The above PowerShell script uses the Remove-Item cmdlet to remove the temporary file from the system temp folder specified by the Path parameter $tempFile. This command uses the Force parameter to forcefully delete the file if it is in use.

Conclusion

I hope the above article on how to create a temporary file in PowerShell using the New-TemporaryFile cmdlet is helpful to you.

Temporary files are useful in storing temporary data during script execution, and preprocessing.

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