What will happen if there is not TEMP variable set or if it is set what will happen if the folder/drive does not exist?

Question

i want to setup a ramdisk for various purposes and among them i would want to set the TEMP variable to point to a folder in the ramdisk. I haven't done this yet, but the ramdisk will be initialized before logging on and i have a certain problem:

if for some reason the ramdisk fails to start what will the result be? The TEMP variable will still point to F:\Foo yet the F: drive will not exist

Additionally what will happen if i don't set a TEMP variable on environment variables?

Thanks for any answers

Answer 1

Windows actually sets 4 "temp" variables:

TEMP and TMP for the current user, plus TEMP and TMP for the system. (Scroll through the list of system variables to see them.) So if you don't set them, nothing bad will happen because Windows does it for you.

As for setting it to a nonexistent drive or folder, that depends on the application. Well-written applications check if an object or setting exists before trying to use it, and abort gracefully if it does not exist. Bad applications just display a sometimes-useless error, or they just crash.