I am trying to clean up after failed installs from ports of Emacs 21 and Emacs 23 as well as Git. I was trying to install Emacs and Git on an OpenBSD v5.2 install on a DEC VaxStation 4000 model 90. It has a staggering 32 megs of RAM and a 2.1 gig hard drive! Very high end for 1991, but all this now seems puny; so yes every last megabyte of hard drive space does matter on this hard drive which is now already 72% full.

My attempts at the installs using make install within the appropriate directory of the /usr/ports tree have failed. I did run make clean after each failed compilation and have also checked /tmp and it is largely empty. OpenBSD seems to also flush /tmp with each reboot. The hard drive capacity does however seem to shrink with each failed program compilation so I am probably accumulating some programs or tarballs or cruft with each attempted installation.

The programs in question are not available as binary packages for the VAX architecture.

How do I clean up after failed ports compilations in this scenario?

It depends how they failed.
Make -k uninstall if it's something you have no other bits for. Really, this is where making packages helps you no end, but you didn't do that, did you?

I have emacs here(Never used it) but it's linked against every standard library in the gnu/linux system, so I'm not surprised it failed. It's even linked against something called 'libhogweed.so'. Were they extracting the urine:-)?

Git is a much smaller package. They don't install large amounts of libraries (Any, afaict) but there may be includes, docs, and the source tarball as well as tmp files.