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Akshay Rao
Akshay Rao

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Automate the deletion of old screenshots.

Introduction
Hi, This is Akshay Rao, in my daily work life I have to take a lot of screenshot for documentation purpose.So, there were so many screenshots and had to delete only other days screenshots, so every day I had to delete them manually.
So, I thought of automating the deletion of screenshots at 5PM everyday.
In this blog will share how i did this.I hope this will help you also.
Lets's start

  • made a file name screenshot-deletion.py
  • we will have to know the path where all the screenshots are saved.
  • now identify the dates that are attached in the name of the screenshot.
  • Identify the dates first with regular expressions.
  • now one by one compare the date with the current date, then delete them.
import os
import re
from datetime import datetime

#set path where all the screenshots are saved
folder_path = "put/path/folder"

files = os.listdir(folder_path)
current_date = datetime.now().date()

#pattern for date to recognize
date_pattern=r"\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}"

#print(current_date)
#print(folder_path)

for file in files:
    file_path=os.path.join(folder_path, file)
    #print(file_path)
    if os.path.isfile(file_path):
        screenshots=re.search(date_pattern, file_path)
        if screenshots:
            if screenshots.group() != current_date:
                try:
                    print("removing this file:", file)
                    os.remove(file_path)
                except Exception as e:
                    print("cannot delete this file - {e}")
        else:
            print("screenshots don't exist")
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  1. edit the crontab -e
00 17 * * * /usr/bin/python3 /path/to/your/script.py
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i hope that this helps you by any means.
Thank you

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