Is there a way, in C# on Windows, to write a file and flag it as temporary so that the operating system won't bother physically writing it to disk? The file in question is small, and will be read by another program in the very near future, and deleted and rewritten very soon after that, so that keeping it purely in RAM would make sense.
I'm currently writing the file with File.WriteAllText but could use a different API if necessary.
That's simple and could be done without any P/Invoke:
var file = File.Create(path); File.SetAttributes(path, File.GetAttributes(path) | FileAttributes.Temporary); The FileAttributes.Temporary enum value is the same as FILE_ATTRIBUTE_TEMPORARY constant (0x100):
Specifying the FILE_ATTRIBUTE_TEMPORARY attribute causes file systems to avoid writing data back to mass storage if sufficient cache memory is available, because an application deletes a temporary file after a handle is closed. In that case, the system can entirely avoid writing the data. Although it does not directly control data caching in the same way as the previously mentioned flags, the FILE_ATTRIBUTE_TEMPORARY attribute does tell the system to hold as much as possible in the system cache without writing and therefore may be of concern for certain applications.
MemoryMappedFilemsdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/…FILE_ATTRIBUTE_TEMPORARYwhen creating the file, that serves as a strong hint to the file system not to bother writing it to disk. I don't know the best way to do that in C# though.FileOptionshad aTemporary = 256member, you could do this without P/Invoking toCreateFile, but in their wisdom the designers chose not to make this option available. (If you try to fudge it in, theFileStreamconstructor will complain.)