I wish Linux (and other Unix-like systems) had an API to let you create named temporary files which are automatically deleted - by the operating system - when a process exits.
If you create an anonymous temporary file, then it will be deleted when the last file descriptor to it is closed-but anonymous temporary files are difficult to use (even given access via /dev/fd aka /proc/self/fd). You can delete it using atexit() but that doesn’t get run if the process terminates abnormally (core dump, kernel panic, kill -9, power outage, etc)
Maybe something like a pidtmpfs where the top-level directories are pid numbers, you can create any files or directories you want under them, but it all disappears as soon as the process with that pid exits. Actually, pids are a bad idea due to pid reuse, you want something like a process serial number or a process UUID which doesn’t get reused.
Another somewhat more flexible idea would be that you can create arbitrary top-level directories, but they - and all their content - are automatically deleted as soon as the last open fd to them is closed. That way you could have multiple processes sharing a temporary workspace, and the workspace could survive the failure of any one of them, but if they all fail it gets deleted
If you create an anonymous temporary file, then it will be deleted when the last file descriptor to it is closed-but anonymous temporary files are difficult to use (even given access via /dev/fd aka /proc/self/fd). You can delete it using atexit() but that doesn’t get run if the process terminates abnormally (core dump, kernel panic, kill -9, power outage, etc)
Maybe something like a pidtmpfs where the top-level directories are pid numbers, you can create any files or directories you want under them, but it all disappears as soon as the process with that pid exits. Actually, pids are a bad idea due to pid reuse, you want something like a process serial number or a process UUID which doesn’t get reused.
Another somewhat more flexible idea would be that you can create arbitrary top-level directories, but they - and all their content - are automatically deleted as soon as the last open fd to them is closed. That way you could have multiple processes sharing a temporary workspace, and the workspace could survive the failure of any one of them, but if they all fail it gets deleted