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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?
Anything I want to get rid of, I put in the /bin. Stuff I can't really categorise I put in /etc, and all the stuff I use goes in /usr.
That man tried to kill mah Daddy
Always make a directory and put the files you are dealing with in it immediately. Don't wait.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Personally I have a ~/tmp and a ~/storage
Anything that I don't need to keep goes in tmp. For example, downloaded RPMs that I just want to install, links to movie clips that freinds send me, most downloads (I move them elsewhere afterwards if I want to keep them), experimental compiles (moving the dir somewhere else if I keep it installed and want to keep the installer for cleaning it up later).
~/storage/ contains anything I want to keep. That includes project files, music, backups and so on.
If I need to make space then ~/tmp gets a scrubbing, if I want to back up or move to a new machine then it's a simple case of copying ~/storage and any ~/.foo config stuff to the new box (or backup in case of a system re-install).
This is easy. Pornographic movies go in the /vids directory, while pornographic images go in the /pics directory.
Simply give all your files names starting with '.'.
I believe posters are recognized by their sig. So I made one.
This is my way.. I stick everything on the desktop, then when desktop is full I make a folder called stuff and move everything into it. rinse, repeat if you get too many folders called stuff2 stuff3 stuff50 whatever, just make a new folder and put all the other folders inside it :)
Sooner or later, google will be right, you won't be able to keep up with all the accumulated crap that TiB hard drives and uber-pipe broadband and "smart" agents and tivo-like p2p this crap was downloaded because it's like the other crap you've searched for
And we will love it.
Before I part with'em: two pennies weigh ~4.996+/-0.014g, have a zinc core, and the face of Lincoln. You can keep 'em.
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.)
This is about a professor of mine from the University of Chicago who is a head honcho at Argonne Labs. Apparently, he's had a reputation for some years of having the most disgusting ~home directory. They eventually made a game about it: what they used to do was somebody would type 'ls' and someone else would get on a bike. Then they'd hit enter and they'd try to do laps around the server room until the ls stopped. I think their record was something around 14.
--Stephen
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
Don't forget ~/sourcecode for pr0n - the wife will never think to look there.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?