eff_i_g,
Here are some things you might want to consider. First, when I am creating a temporary file it is almost always called foo (foo.pl, foo.csv, etc). You might want to include things like foo/bar/blah/asdf to your list of candidates. Also, I often create a directory called backup or archive where I still files in. You should consider that all the files named normally in a directory might be temporary solely because of the directory they are in. I have also adopted a convention of appending a number or a date to a file if I want to keep a few versions around (some_utility.3 or some_utility.pl.3 or some_utility.2010-12-31). You may also want to consider using a checksum to determine if there are any truly duplicate files regardless of the name.

As for identifying the truly temporary files - all 3 of your examples are exactly 10 characters long. I am not sure if that is a coincidence but it should be efficient to write a more robust noise detector if it is only applied to files that are 10 characters long that do not contain a period.

Cheers - L~R

In reply to Re: Finding Temporary Files by Limbic~Region
in thread Finding Temporary Files by eff_i_g

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