A disk file made by a program meant for temporary storage while not using precious RAM.

On DOS boxes, these files tend to pile up in c:\temp, c:\windows\temp, or whatever you have the TEMP environment variable set to. On unix boxes, these pile up in /tmp and sometimes under /var. The piling up of temp files is caused by a program or the system crashing before the temp file can be deleted. While these piles can be evil, wasting disk space, they do not disrupt the operation of the system overall, other than running out of free disk space.

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