Bash CleanMyMac alternative 🧼

As you might know by now, I really like Bash!

So far, we have built some fun stuff using Bash like hacking our morning routine and making an after work git check.

For a lot of my articles I use Carbon to generate these cool previews.
Very cool app, but my Downloads folder gets full of these things.

So how can Bash help us CleanOurMacs?

Bash clean files

Note: This script can be very dangerous since it uses Bash to remove files. Please be cautious!

We will be using a txt file to loop over files we want to remove.

These files can include a wildcard (*) or start with a specific string:

• Start with: carbon
• Wildcard: carbon*.png

Then on to the script!

while read line; do
    find . -name "$line" -exec rm -rf {} \;
done < ~/www/cleanMyPc/files.txt
echo 'All done';

Wow, simple as that right!

We loop through the lines in our files.txt, and for each line we execute the find command it searches for a specific name and calls -exec rm -rf

The rm stands for remove and rf for recursive force.

Running the script

This script initially worked so it would scan all your files, but I adjusted it for security reasons to only scan a specific folder.

1. So open a Terminal
2. Navigate to the folder you want: cd Downloads
3. Execute command ~/path/to/script/bash.sh
4. Voila, all done

It's a very simple script, but it can be useful to find/remove certain files on your computer.

Find this project on GitHub

Thank you for reading, and let's connect!

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Comments

[Waylon Walker]

Next up

alias cleanmac=~/www/cleanMyPc/bash.sh

Or filter to files older than a few days and add it to your crontab 🤔

[Chris Bongers]

The alias is welcome indeed, crontab not too sure, always a bit "worry" of auto-deleting.
Also, the reason why I deleted it searching in every folder haha.