How To Manage Your Home Directory?

gustgr writes "There are times I got surprised after running ls in my $HOME directory. It is filled with trash, test files, directories that were supposed to be only temporary, ascii files with quick notes and all sort of stuff. In other words, it is a complete mess. Then I remove the trash, clean up the directories, run the mv command a few times and everything looks good and normal again. Two weeks later the disorder is back and I have to handle it again. How do you manage your home directory in order to keep it clean? Are your homes a mess too?" I usually keep folders labeled "audible," "visible," "legible," and "work," and subfolders within these that are at least mostly consistent between computers / drives; every day or so I sweep loose files into these, then open each folder, sort, repeat. How do you sort your data?

Comments

For now, I'm letting it go to hell

[Dixie_Flatline]

For the moment, I'm just letting everything go to pot. I just throw things in whatever directory is convenient, and hope that I remember where I put it later. I'm really looking forward to Spotlight on OS X.

Personally, I think that in a few years time, heirarchical filesystems will be on their way out. With the current state of computing, there's little reason to have such a system when you can have a filesystem that does all the work for you. I've heard that the same functionality will be coming to Linux through ReiserFS (though I admit to not following that very closely since I'm obviously an OS X user).

So, that probably doesn't help you much, but then again, it might. Just look around for a system that allows fast indexed searching of your machine so you don't have to keep track of this crap yourself.

(Incidentally, it isn't only you. In one of the ACM's recent quarterly journals on Human-Computer Interaction, it found that most users are unable to keep track of where their files are because there are just too many of them. Also, it found that the search facilities currently in place in Windows and Mac (OS 9?) systems are entirely inadequate for the task.)

Re:For now, I'm letting it go to hell

[hackstraw]

Me too. I just thow crap in my home directories until 'ls' simply outputs too much stuff, and then I clean up.

My personal machine is a mac as well, and my safari download location is my home directory. I actually like my home directory messy :) It makes a quick 'scp' easier because I don't have to type or remember the path either on the 'to' or 'from' machine. I always know where my current files are. Simply typing 'ls' is pretty much always useless. 'ls -lotr' is usually better. WIldcards really help.

I consider stuff in my home directory as kinda temporary and/or immediate files. Meaning that I could be using them for the next couple of months or so. I find it too easy to use wildcards and to sort by time to waste my time cleaning up stuff. If someone mentions a PDF that they sent me last week I do ls -lotr *.pdf Odds are its near the bottom somewhere with a filename that makes sense.

Now if something is important enough that I want to keep it semi-indefinitely, I put it somewhere where I can find it later, most likely on 2 different computers, and often one of them gets backed up.

I thought of writing a cronjob to go and touch all of the file in my home directory that do not begin with '.' and are not directories and have a timestamp of older than 24 hours, and automatically moving junk to some directory after 14 days or so, but I havn't done that yet.

I guess my point is that 1) besides my '.' files, I consier all files in $HOME to be basically temporary. Most of them are downloads which are located in safari's download manager for some time, and are also easily reobtainable. I don't mind the mess because filtering, grepping, sorting makes finding something trivial. Once things get "out of hand", I clean up. Sometimes I just move bunches of junk to a new dirctory called 'stuff' or something, and after its been in stuff long enough and I havn't needed any files from there, I just toss stuff. 2) I put important files in logical places where I know important files go. And, I always have at least one form of redundancy.

Don't make little files!

[erikharrison]

The real trick is to USE APPLICATIONS! Don't keep notes in temp files, or little files with peoples phone numbers. Use a sticky note app, use a contact app. You'll find that they not only keep your home directory clean, but these developers have thought of all the things you can do with that info, and made most of it pretty easy.

Really, I kept all my numbers in a file, yadda yadda yadda. "I don't need no stinking calendar app". But once I used it, I realized that, in fact, I did. Try it

Re:Don't make little files!

[angst_ridden_hipster]

But make sure the applications you use have good standards for import/export, or are open source with comprehensible code in a language for which you have some hope of proficiency.

Otherwise, when the application programmer goes away, or the company goes out of business, you can be stranded with your data in a lot of obscure (probably binary) formats that are now useless. Of course, you only discover this kind of thing after an OS upgrade or something that breaks the old application...