Disk space eaten up

[Przemek Klosowski]

I had this problem once: I had a long-running optimization problem
where I wanted to see the solution evolving and plotted a bunch of
data every iteration. It created several hundred thousand files in
/tmp; everything on the system that even tried to look at contents of
/tmp would hang for minutes; just deleting those files took several hours.

The tempfile situation is changing, because most temp files were
created for Gnuplot, and the plotting method is changing to piping
data and eventually completely away from Gnuplot. Still, for large
plotting tasks it's probably wise to do system('rm /tmp/oct*') periodically.
This seems a little crude---can anyone think of a better way?