Is there a great advantage over standard shell commands, besides being in Ruby? For example, the following rule:<p><pre><code> rule 'Trash old temporary files' do
dir('~/Outbox/*.tmp.*').each do |p|
trash(p) if 1.week.since?(modified_at(p))
end
end
</code></pre>
can be replaced with:<p><pre><code> #Trash old temporary files
find ~/Outbox/ -iname '*.tmp.*' -mtime +7 -exec mv {} ~/.Trash \;
</code></pre>
The maid script may be more readable if you don't know 'find', but on the other hand, this has only one line.
One of the areas where I disembark from the traditional Unix way is to replace "--dry-run" like flags with "--enable-destruction". That way I have to intentionally do the bad thing.
A nice feature that could be implemented on OS X would be to auto-organize files by the domain they're downloaded from.<p>Safari on OS X puts the source link of a downloaded file in the spotlight metadata, which can be accessed via "mdls" - an excerpt:<p><pre><code> $ mdls Inconsolata-Bold.ttf
-- other metadata --
kMDItemWhereFroms = (
"http://googlefontdirectory.googlecode.com/hg/ofl/inconsolata/Inconsolata-Bold.ttf,
"http://code.google.com/p/googlefontdirectory/source/browse/ofl/inconsolata/Inconsolata-Bold.ttf
)
</code></pre>
Personally, I'd find that much more useful than the "all pdf's are books" example.
Something that I recently started to do that seemed to help me it to point downloads of FF and Chrome to /tmp. So if I downloaded something important I immediately moved it to where it belonged.<p>On reboot all the stuff you didn't care about is gone.
I like it, but prefer something like guard-shell which is event-driven: <a href="https://github.com/guard/guard-shell" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/guard/guard-shell</a>
I've been meaning to try maid, I installed the gem but I've yet to do anything more. Thanks for posting this, as now I have some incentive to configure it.
This is pretty much horrifying (to someone like me who likes to meticulously manage and know where things are instead of treating "Downloads" or "Desktop" like a flat-filesystem.<p>Is it really that hard to just, you know, delete a few files whenever you download something? Download X. Okay. Download Y, go to open Y, delete X while you're there.<p>Somehow I have 6 TB of data and it's all organized. I don't have any files on my Desktop or Downloads folder. Amazingly, I don't have to spend 4 minutes looking for something when I need to pull something up to look at it or send to a friend.