  With the use of the world-line formalism, the heavy-quark condensate in the
SU(N)-QCD is evaluated for the cases when the next-to-1/r term in the
quark-antiquark potential at short distances is either quadratic, or linear. In
the former case, the standard QCD-sum-rules result is reproduced, while the
latter result is a novel one. Explicitly, it is UV-finite only in less than
four dimensions. This fact excludes a possibility to have, in four dimensions,
very short strings (whose length has the scale of the lattice spacing), and
consequently the short-range linear potential (if it exists) cannot violate the
OPE. In any number of dimensions, the obtained novel expression for the quark
condensate depends on the string tension at short distances, rather than on the
gluon condensate, and grows linearly with the number of colors in the same way
as the standard QCD-sum-rules expression. The use of the world-line formalism
enables one to generalize further both results to the case of finite
temperatures. A generalization of the QCD-sum-rules expression to the case of
an arbitrary number of space-time dimensions is also obtained and is shown to
be UV-finite, provided this number is smaller than six.
