Comment by hackyhacky

Rather than re-write your scripts to store temp files into /dev/shm, you can just mount /tmp using the tmpfs file system and get the same benefit for all your programs. Some distros do this by default.

The relevant line from fstab is:

    tmpfs /tmp            tmpfs    noatime 0       2

Now any program that writes to /tmp will be writing to a RAM disk, thus sparing unnecessary wear on my SSD.