Bug 37035

Summary: Prevent temp\ directory disappearing when tar.gz is used on Windows
Product: Tomcat 5 Reporter: Jeff Turner <jefft>
Component: UnknownAssignee: Tomcat Developers Mailing List <dev>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED    
Severity: enhancement    
Priority: P2    
Version: 5.5.12   
Target Milestone: ---   
Hardware: Other   
OS: Windows XP   

Description Jeff Turner 2005-10-12 02:22:26 UTC 
If a user:

 - is on Windows
 - downloads the tar.gz distribution
 - unpacks with WinZIP

then Tomcat breaks in odd ways. This is because the temp\ directory is empty in
the distribution, and WinZIP's default behaviour is not to create directories if
they are empty.

I know this is a combination of WinZIP stupidity and odd user behaviour, but
there is an easy way to avoid the problem: add a temp\README.txt file so the
directory is non-empty.

There was a temp\README.txt in 4.1 days, which read:

"""
This temp directory is used by the JVM for temporary file storage.
The JVM is configured to use this as its java.io.tmpdir in the
catalina.sh and catalina.bat scripts.  Tomcat is configured to use
this temporary directory rather than its default for security reasons.
The temp directory must exist for Tomcat to work correctly.
"""
Comment 1 Yoav Shapira 2005-10-17 01:18:16 UTC 
You're right, it IS a combination of WinZip stupidity and odd user behavior.  We
recommend Windows users use the .zip distribution: that's why it's there ;)

That said, I've added a placeholder file in the temp directly to the binary
distributions.  It does not contain the same text as Tomcat 4.1 as that text is
no longer accurate.
Comment 2 platnium 2009-10-21 22:00:58 UTC 
(In reply to comment #1)
> You're right, it IS a combination of WinZip stupidity and odd user behavior.  We
> recommend Windows users use the .zip distribution: that's why it's there ;)
> That said, I've added a placeholder file in the temp directly to the binary
> distributions.  It does not contain the same text as Tomcat 4.1 as that text is
> no longer accurate.

may u please explain it for me that why it is not accurate?