I'm not worried about block chain size nearly as much as log file size. Is there some way to make bitcoin restrain it's log file to a certain size, deleting older log data as it goes? I've had to switch storage spaces several times to accommodate the log file, or delete the log file after shutting down the bitcoin client.
Just found that there is an undocumented -printtoconsole option that will attempt to write to stdout instead of to the log file. It may or may not succeed in writing to stdout but it seems it does suppress appending to the log file.