You probably want something like pyfakefs[1], a reimplementation of Python's (old) filesystem modules for the purpose of testing. My guess is that either you w

You probably want something like pyfakefs[1], a reimplementation of Python's (old) filesystem modules for the purpose of testing. My guess is that either you will have to write it, or you will have to convince a C++ developer that it is worth writing cppfakefs. Otherwise, you can build a test_root_dir RAII object that creates a directory in /tmp and does the cleanup automatically in its destructor. [1]: https://code.google.com/p/pyfakefs/ https://code.google.com/p/pyfakefs/