directory A pointer to the pathname of the directory where you want to create a file. prefix A pointer to an initial character sequence of the filename. The prefix argument can be null, or it can point to a string of up to five characters used as the first characters of the temporary filename. . . . An optional argument that can be either 1 or 0. If you specify 1, tempnam returns the file specification in OpenVMS format. If you specify 0, tempnam returns the file specification in UNIX style format.