diff --git a/unittest/include_gunit.h b/unittest/include_gunit.h
index 3ffb6ea26b..ac85eeebb0 100644
--- a/unittest/include_gunit.h
+++ b/unittest/include_gunit.h
@@ -17,7 +17,7 @@
 #include "fileio.h"   // for tesseract::File
 #include "gtest/gtest.h"
 
-const char* FLAGS_test_tmpdir = TESTDATA_DIR;
+const char* FLAGS_test_tmpdir = "./tmp";
 
 class file : public tesseract::File {
 public: