Be lazy! Let Maid clean up after you, based on rules you define.
Maid keeps files from sitting around too long, untouched. Many of the downloads and other files you collect can easily be categorized and handled appropriately by rules you define. Let the maid in your computer take care of the easy stuff, so you can spend more of your time on what matters.
Think of it like the email filters you might already have, but for files. Worried about things happening that you don't expect? Maid doesn't overwrite files and actions are logged so you can tell what happened.
Maid is inspired by the Mac OS X shareware program Hazel. This tool was created on Mac OS X 10.6, but should be generally portable to other systems. (Some of the more advanced features such as downloaded_from require OS X, however.)
Your rules are defined in Ruby, so easy rules are easy and difficult rules are possible.
Yes.
If you have RubyGems installed (default on Mac OS X and many Ruby installations):
gem install maid
If you want to install the executable for all users, you may need to give root access:
sudo gem install maid
As you might expect, you need Ruby and RubyGems installed to do the above.
sudo apt-get install ruby
sudo apt-get install rubygems
You might also need to add the RubyGems bin directory to your $PATH. For example, on Ubuntu you might need to add something like this to your ~/.bashrc:
export PATH="/var/lib/gems/1.8/bin:$PATH"
Maid rules are defined using Ruby, with some common operations made easier with a small DSL (Domain Specific Language). Here's a sample:
Maid.rules do
rule 'Old files downloaded while developing/testing' do
dir('~/Downloads/*').each do |path|
if downloaded_from(path).any? {|u| u.match 'http://localhost'} && 1.week.since?(last_accessed(path))
trash(path)
end
end
end
end
Before you start running your rules, you'll likely want to be able to test them. Here's how:
# No actions are taken; you just see what would happen with your rules as defined.
maid --dry-run
maid --noop
maid -n
To run your rules on demand, you can run maid manually:
maid # Run the rules at ~/.maid/rules.rb, logging to ~/.maid/maid.log
maid -r some_rules.rb # Run the rules in the file 'some_rules.rb', logging to ~/.maid/maid.log
So, for example, if this is some_rules.rb:
Maid.rules do
rule 'downloaded PDF books' do
dir('~/Downloads/*.pdf').each do |path|
move(path, '~/Books')
end
end
end
This is the command to test, as well as some sample output:
$ maid -nr some_rules.rb
Rule: downloaded PDF books
mv "/Users/ben/Downloads/book.pdf" "/Users/ben/Books/"
mv "/Users/ben/Downloads/issue12.pdf" "/Users/ben/Books/"
mv "/Users/ben/Downloads/spring2011newsletter.pdf" "/Users/ben/Books/"
For more DSL helper methods, please see the documentation of Maid::Tools.
Once you get a hang for what you can do with Maid, let it do its stuff automatically throughout the day. You'll find your computer stays a little tidier with as you teach it how to handle your common files.
To do this, edit your crontab in your tool of choice and have it invoke the maid command. The --silent option is provided to keep this from emailing you, if desired. A log of the actions taken is kept at ~/.maid/maid.log.
Example for every day at 1am:
# minute hour day_of_month month day_of_week command_to_execute
0 1 * * * /bin/bash -li -c "maid --silent"
Both Mac OS X and Linux support callbacks when folders are changed, and that may be a forthcoming feature in Maid. That said, I find cron to take care of most of my needs.
For a sample rules file, run:
maid sample
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