How to avoid littering one's Tex directories with intermediate files

Question

From https://mathoverflow.net/questions/8603/how-not-to-auto-generate-aux-bak-files-in-latex-closed

I use winedt. I prefer to only have .tex files, or just dvi, pdf files that I need. i don't need these other files. Anyone knows how to disable them? Coz too many files look really messy. Thank you. :)

There are several ways I can think of of achieving this, but maybe I haven't thought of the cleanest and easiest, and I want to have this question as a reference.

So what are the alternatives, and what drawbacks might they have? Any platform (Miktex, Texlive, etc.). Maybe nice to have one technique per answer

Answer 1

There's a script out there called latexmk. It basically runs latex enough times to get cross-referencing correct, and when used with the -c option, it cleans up the auxiliary files. It's included in TeXLive.

Answer 2

I use make to build my latex documents (no, it is not as smart as latexmk, but it is installed on all the systems I encounter and all my colleagues have it, so I can distribute documents with a build system that way), and I always have clean and cleaner targets to remove stray latex droppings and editor backup files.