Against /Tmp

So here we have again how "Worse is better" works in practice, and how we got here regarding /tmp in 2024.

As if C:\TEMP or %tmpdir% were any better.

Or using letters as drivers.

Worse is better? A lot of tech in Win32 is built as if it were for DOS 1.0 or CP/M. See AUX, PRN, COM and so.

Backward compatibility, innit.

Microsoft have tried to get people to use the newer, more heavily sandboxed APIs like UWP, but only very weakly, and they haven't committed to transitioning their own apps over as dogfood. Nearest they've got is actually migrating a lot of office to the cloud as Office365.

Sunsetting Win32, or even having significant backwards-compatibility breaks, would upset so many corporate customers who would then refuse to upgrade.

> As if C:\TEMP or %tmpdir% were any better.

I mean, yes? %tmp% is in the user's directory, not accessible by the world.

Yeah, nice jab attempt, except no one sells MS-DOS decisions as some grandiose OS architecture design.

Its origins are quite clear, QDOS, Quick and Dirty Operating System.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/86-DOS

TMPDIR can be trivially set at $HOME/tmp too with just a file at /etc/profile