Save your disk, write files directly into RAM with /dev/shm

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.

I do mention this offhand in the article: "The existence of /dev/shm is a boon for me mostly because it means I never have to worry about whether /tmp is really RAM-based again."

"virtually every Unix system already has it mounted as a tmpfs by default" might be true if you say Linux instead, but Mac doesn't have /dev/shm