On 22/05/15 15:18, Jim Lesurf wrote:
In article
wwvlhggrcx4.fsf@l1AntVDjLrnP7Td3DQJ8ynzIq3lJMueXf 87AxnpFoA.invalid,
Richard Kettlewell wrote:

A common configuration is for /tmp to be a tmpfs. People who don't make
it a tmpfs presumably don't care... Put another way there's a limit to
how much policy your program should be setting; rather, it should be
following the user's policy.

If I understand that correctly it sums up one of the reasons for my
problem.

Under RO I'm used to ram: being the standard place for "temporary files
held in ram". But with the Mint boxes I have the temp 'device' seems to be
in /run, not /tmp. And presumably the assigned 'directory name' will vary
from one distro to another.

The other side of the problem is that I need a file *name* to get flac to
save its results to a file. Then have that name to get a handle to read the
contents (and delete the file afterwards) in my main program.

Do you really need to do it this way? It seems rather inefficient.
I would prefer to make use of pipes, and get flac to stream the output to stdout and the program to read it from stdin.

This would avoid the nasty mess of temporary files, and reduce the wear on any physical disk.