Best practice for saving temporary files in macOS?

Question

Is there a common practice where to save temporary files on macOS? Currently I'm using /tmp but I often see the folder /var/folders in use for saving temporary files.

Is there a suggested way?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I don't know of any official guide, but I would say:

• use /tmp for temporary things that do not need to survive a reboot

• use /var/tmp for temporary things that do need to survive reboot

On my system at least, /var/folders is quite restricted in who can access it:

drwxr-xr-x  4 root  wheel  136 28 Oct  2015 /var/folders