Future Deletion

Future Deletion (fudel) is a tool to schedule the deletion of files and directories. This can be useful to keep your files on your system for a certain number of days without have to worry to periodically clean up the system. The tool is a command-line tool with a minimal GUI support and notification system.

The project is based on sqlite_modern_cpp wrapper library.

Prerequisites

You need to install the following libraries to compile the project:

• libnotify
• gtkmm-3.0
• C++17 compliant compiler
• libsqlite3

Usage

Show the help menu:

$ ./fudel -h
Future Deletion Program, delete files in the next days
Usage:
  Fudel [OPTION...]

  -h, --help          Show this help
  -g, --gui           Add gui support
  -s, --show          Show files in the database (output in JSON format)
  -c, --check         Check and remove aged files
  -n, --new arg       Add a new file that will be deleted after the specified
                      lifetime (-a)
  -a, --age arg       Set the time to wait for the new file until the
                      deletion
  -p, --postpone arg  Increase lifetime of the specified file
  -r, --remove arg    Remove a file from the database (not from the disk)

The first time you run the tool, it'll create a local database file (called files.db) in the same path of the executable.

Add a new file to the database:

$ ./fudel -n /tmp/test.txt -a 10

In this way, we added the entry /tmp/test.txt in the database with associated its lifetime 10. Show the database content with the following command:

$ ./fudel -s                    
ID:14,AGE:1,PATH:/tmp/a.txt
ID:15,AGE:10,PATH:/tmp/test.txt
ID:16,AGE:1,PATH:/tmp/test2.txt

Every time you invoke --check parameter, fudel iterates over all the entries in the database decreasing the age. When the age is equal to 0, the file/directory is deleted. Thus, if you schedule a crontab job each day to run ./fudel -c, in this case this means that age are the days left before the deletion.

If you set the --gui option, when used in combination with -n and -p, it will show a GTK prompt where to insert the age. The usage is intended to be easier integrated into other tools (e.g. a file manager). For example, considering Thunar, you can set a custom action executing: ./fudel -n '%f' -g.