Previously, a command like

$ ghc -tmpdir blah Foo

where the directory blah/ does not exist, would loop forever: getTempDir
would repeatedly try to create a temporary subdirectory inside blah/,
catching the does-not-exist error thrown by createDirectory and
retrying, in vain, with another suffix.

Now instead the above compiler invocation will fail with an error:

blah/ghc25781_0: createDirectory: does not exist (No such file or directory)