temporary file space snippet

Often I need a temporary directory for a shell script to do work in, one that gets cleaned up even if the script is aborted by the user with CTRL-C. I spent an hour or so figuring out how to make the cleanup happen reliably and now use the following snippet for the task of making and cleaning up the temporary directory.

tmp=/tmp/$$
mkdir $tmp || exit 1;
cleanup() { rm -r -f "$tmp"; }
trap "cleanup" EXIT