You could have /home/junk2020, /home/junk2021, /home/junk2022 etc. Still self-cleaning, but it's once a year.

Or I could have /home/junk, self-cleaning but never!

That is me, I have `/home/delme` since forever!

You know what else is self-cleaning?

   /dev/shm

The advantage being that it does not even touch the disk.

One can use tmpfs for /tmp as well (and I do it).

I present you my most used shell function:

    cdtmp() {
        cd $(mktemp -d)
    }

That's fantastic, thanks! I always used to do this by hand. Though one downside is that the name is random, and it's hard to go back if you CD out. I might use diceware to make a memorable random name.

I agree that sometimes that is a problem, so I find out the latest tmp directory with ls -tr /tmp | tail. But using nicer names would help with that.

So I took your tip and now I have

    cdtmp() {
        local name
        name=/tmp/$(diceware --no-caps -d - -n 2)
        mkdir $name && cd $name
    }

I decided not to worry about the directory existing already, or of the other checks mktemp -d would do for me in my single-user system.. I suppose mktemp -d -t cdtmpXXX would work almost as well. Thanks for the idea!

Thank you! That's very neat, I'll implement this myself as well.