%temp% file? (Vista Home Premium)

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Hello,and greetings from the great free state of tennessee
While having problems trying to download “acronis true image trial v11” the tech rep asked me to delete the %temp% file.First what does the (%……%) mean? second i could not delete it once i found it. (was in use for another program.) Was he “off base”or am i missing the point? Regards Plain Fred.

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Hi Fred,
Usually %…% means the default drive where windows is located. In most cases the C drive. So %temp% would be C:temp.
A good thing to do would be to empty the temporary Internet files folder.
Open Internet Options and click on the delete tab. A menu should be there to delete the TIF and history and temp files.

If you have a file or folder that refuses to be deleted you can download and install UNLOCKER

An easy to use and very handy little utility, that once installed will be available on a right click or automatically come up when to try to delete a file unsuccessfully. It will ask you if you want to delete it and you unlock it to do the job.

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Bob,StuartR, Jeff ,Big Al,
Thank you all (“ya all”) for all the explanations and down load sites. The “ccleaner ,unlocker, set command ” are enough to keep me busy (and probably in trouble for days to come) Guess that i’ll have to run out and buy that “acronis true image v 11″after all. Regards to all Plain Fred.

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Fred,

Windows stores a number of “Environment variables” that can be accessed by programs. These include TEMP, HOME, USERNAME, COMPUTERNAME and many others.
When you want to use one of these in a Batch file, or from the command prompt, you use the syntax %variablename%, so %TEMP% tells windows to use the value of the temp variable.

You can see a list of all defined variables by typing SET to a command prompt.

StuartR

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In reply to your main question, that I nearly missed.

It is often a good idea to delete everything in the TEMP folder, as this can build up large numbers of files. I have seen many cases where some software failed to install, but deleting everything in %TEMP% fixed this.

There are always some files in use in the temp folder, and trying to delete these will cause errors. What I do is note the name of the file causing the error and then try to delete everything else. I eventually get down to 5 or 6 files in use, but the thousands of other files do get deleted.

StuartR

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Fred,

Just on the outside chance you have misunderstood, you are to delete the CONTENTS of the %temp% FOLDER and not the folder itself (it’s a folder and not a file). And as Stuart pointed out, there are generally a few files in the C:Temp folder which are in use and cannot be deleted, but they are few. CCleaner usually cleans out all that can be removed in not only that particular folder but all other folders that contain “temporary” file types. If you haven’t used CCleaner before, then I would highly recommend you grab a copy of this free program and use it.

Get it here: CCleaner ‘Slim’ version download (English language and no Yahoo Toolbar) 838 KB.
Here’s a link for: CCleaner homepage.

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Pilgrim’s point is a well taken one, that it’s a folder not a file. But just for the heck of it, since some of you have mentioned C:temp folder, on my system which I did nothing to change from the default Vista installation, the %temp% environment variable points to the folder as shown in this brief clip. You can always find out where YOURS is pointing (as Stuart said) by entering SET in a command prompt window.

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