This BoingBoing article reminded me of my own actions to this end: Simple way to keep your download folder tidy – Boing Boing
From Danny O’Brien, a nice hack for keeping your download folder tidy — a script that deletes everything that’s more than a week old. I’d like one of these to run on my ~/.Trash folder, too.
I am not (for reasons that Danny himself appreciates) sanguine about third-party jobs that delete things over time. That said, this isn’t a bad idea.
One thing I’ve done on my XP machine to keep automatically keep cruft from building up is … well, nothing. But I make it easy to spot and delete when I do start getting that annoying “You are running low on space” message.
I’ve created a separate “~Downloads” folder at the top of My Documents. The tilde causes it to sort to the top of the list, and having it in My Documents gives it maximum visibility. That way I can easily get to stuff I know I’ve downloaded recently — either to find it again, or delete it.
Beyond that, I’ve created a “~Temp” folder in the same location. That’s where I save 9 out of 10 documents, with the person rule that anything that is there mya get deleted at any time. That’s because 90% of my documents end up getting emailed to someone else, and thus get stored in the email system (and archived back out again when I do my monthly email archive). Not only does the ~Temp folder make saving docs (many of which are being passed around by email for collaborative purposes anyway) a lot easier, and it makes purging all the old stuff a lot easier, too.
Nothing profound here. Just sharing.