Temporary Files Accumulating and Filling Disk Space

Your application creates temporary files for processing (image transforms, PDF generation, CSV exports, file uploads) but never deletes them afterward. Over days or weeks, these orphaned files accumulate and eventually fill the disk, causing the application to crash or become unresponsive.

This is a silent issue that doesn't appear during development or testing because the files accumulate slowly. In production, you first notice it when the server runs out of disk space, uploads start failing, or the database can't write its WAL files.

The root cause is that Claude Code generated the file creation logic but didn't include cleanup logic, error handling that cleans up on failure, or a scheduled cleanup job.