One of the biggest issues on any system of mine is the cluttering of the Downloads folder. In the modern Internet age, we download a ton of files. Checking right now, the contents of my Downloads folder sum to about 15GB in filesize. Although that probably isn’t too much of an issue given the cheapness of storage today, it remains troublesome when hand-searching through the files.

When I only ran Windows, I used Cyber-D’s Autodelete to delete my old downloads. This worked perfectly for me, except for the fact that sometimes it would delete files that I forgot that I wanted. But with Windows, I could always find those files in the recycle bin.

Fast forward several years, and I now run Linux as my primary operating system. Without doing much research to see if a program already existed, I drafted a “spec” for download-sweeper, a program that would delete old files in the Downloads directory, but also allow the user a “grace period” where they could still recover old Download files if they were removed.

Sure, this could probably be created in less than 100 lines of C, but I was looking to create a robust and portable solution that would allow me to quickly make changes if I needed to. Thus, I created a clean (~350 lines) Python solution that would do just that.

Further, when integrated with systemd, everything works perfectly. I currently have the application deployed on my Laptop, my Desktop, and on the webserver that’s running this blog. Of course, there aren’t any downloads on the webserver, so I use it to act as a “virus/malware quarantining tool”.

You can view the project on its GitHub page, here: https://github.com/brandonio21/download-sweeper