compress work dir?

[Jose Vidal]

Anyone know what directory, utilities like compress and gzip use for temporary work files?
Is it $TMPDIR?

[Alan Riggs]

I do not believe they stage temporary files in another directory. They either write directly to the uncompressed/unzipped file or write to standard out (if you secify that option).

[Alan Riggs]

I do not believe they stage temporary files in another directory. They either write directly to the uncompressed/unzipped file or write to standard out (if you secify that option).

[Philip Chan_1]

I think Alan is correct. To clarify this can't you use glance to watch the gzip process and see what files are being opened?