Overriding TMPDIR when you don’t have enough space on /tmp

Sometimes you might not have enough disk space on the /tmp directory but need it badly. For example when creating a deb package from a Java tarball in Debian using make-jpkg, there’s no command line parameter or any other apparent means to specify an alternative working directory for temporary files.

Check-mate? Luckily, no! I could force a different directory using the TMPDIR environment variable like this:

TMPDIR=/some/where make-jpkg jdk-7u45-linux-x64.tar.gz