Clutter in programmer workspaces, whether digital or physical, can add a mental
cost. An area of common clutter is the ~/Downloads directory in Mac OS X. I
want to clean it up … programmatically.
The Goal
I want a background job to find files in ~/Downloads which haven’t been
modified within the past week and move them into ~/.Trash.
In zsh, the command for this is: mv ~/Downloads/*(mw+1) ~/.Trash.
Read man zshexpn for more awesomeness on shell expansion.
Launch Agents
For a user-specific background job, Apple recommends creating a Launch
Agent, which is a .plist XML file located in ~/Library/LaunchAgents.
The ~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.thoughtbot.cleandownloads.plist file will run
my script once an hour:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Label</key>
<string>com.thoughtbot.cleandownloads</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>mv</string>
<string>~/Downloads/*(mw+1) ~/.Trash</string>
</array>
<key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
<dict>
<key>Hour</key>
<integer>1</integer>
</dict>
</dict>
</plist>
Read Creating Launch Daemons and Agents for more on how to structure
the .plist file.
