Use The /tmp Luke
Over the last couple of years I have come to use the /tmp
directory on a daily basis.
It came about because I was frustrated at all the old downloads, screenshots, database dumps, test files, etc. that would clutter up my home folder. Every now and again, I would manually go through and delete stuff, but I wanted a way of automatically clearing it out. I thought about writing some kind of script which would select folders which hadn't been read/written to in x days.
All the ideas I had were kinda gross and felt like I was going to end up inadvertently deleting something important.
It occurred to me some time later that the solution to my problem had already been invented, many, many years ago:
/tmp
. Some people will point out how using /tmp
is unsecure because it is globally accessible, while this is true
I'm the only user on the machine, and I'm not storing sensitive stuff there. I'm not going to worry.
I created an alias which will quickly create a new temporary directory and drop me into it:
alias cdmktemp="cd $(mktemp -d)"
. I can mess around with stuff in there, and then cd away knowing it will all
get cleaned up on restart.