A simple function to automatically append info about deleted files to a cleanup log!
Motivation
(I originally wanted to just tweet this little trick out, but 140 characters is rarely sufficient for this sort of thing.)
Anyhow - sometimes, when dealing with large amounts of intermediate files in a project, it can be useful to log what’s being deleted when and where. Here’s a quick bash trick for setting up a function that logs a) which files where deleted, b) when they were deleted, and c) how much space was freed up as a consequence.
I’m sure there are more elegant ways to do this, but this has worked well for me thus far!
Method
First, let’s create a log file for our project. This is where our function will log everything we delete.
touch path/to/projectdir/cleanup.log
Next, we’ll open up our .bash_profile in order to create our function.
vi ~/.bash_profile
Here’s the template for my function, which I call rml() (‘remove and log’).
Paste the following anywhere within the body of your .bash_profile. Make sure
to use the full path to your cleanup.log file from the root dir.
rml () {
printf '\n' >> [log file]
date >> [log file]
echo $1 >> [log file]
du -hcs $1 >> [log file]
rm $1
}
Annotated:
rml () {
printf '\n' >> [log file] # skip a line for readability
date >> [log file] # log the date of deletion
echo $1 >> [log file] # the name of the file
du -hcs $1 >> [log file] # the size of the file
rm $1 # and finally, delete it
}
Feel free to customize this however you’d like! When you’re done, exit out of
vi and make sure to source your .bash_profile.
source ~/.bash_profile
You only have to do this once, and then you’re ready to go.
From there on out, just use rml in place of rm to log a file’s deletion. For
instance, the following command:
rml projectdir/bigintermediatefile.txt
will automatically add something like this to cleanup.log:
Tue Aug 1 12:09:01 EDT 2017
bigintermediatefile.txt
6.0G bigintermediatefile.txt
6.0G total
Enjoy!