I've noticed that some function packages make use of "home-made" functions to create a temporary file in the user's dotdir. These probably work fine in most cases, but they're not safe against race conditions and I thought we should have a "proper" way of doing the job. That's now provided by outfile. You say outfile foo --tempfile where "foo" is either the name of an existing string variable or a valid hansl identifier that's not yet used for any object. The outcome is that a file is created in dotdir using the safe C-library function mkstemp(), and its name is written into foo (which is created if it doesn't already exist). <hansl> string foo # declaration optional outfile foo --tempfile # do stuff ... end outfile printf "Output went to %s\n", foo printf "Content is\n%s\n", readfile(foo) </hansl> Allin