More file management with Keyboard Maestro

The spring cleaning of my drives has begun and with it comes several more helpful commands set up within Keyboard Maestro. While you can buy utilities that perform these same actions, by using Keyboard Maestro you can configure exactly how they work and chain them all together into a very handy set of utilities.

I used my previous applet to move a whole series of files and folders, now I'm using another to clean my drive of all sorts of useless and wasteful files. For example, I don't need readme.txt files of 1k. Or file_id.diz of 1k. Or empty directories. Or .nfo files. Or .url files. Just to name a few.

The may not take up much space, but in reality, they do. They occupy the full block of hard drive space, even if they are only a few bytes in size. Why clutter up the drive? Why clutter up a duplicate manager tool? Why clutter up an index tool like NeoFinder?

It's time to get rid of these and dozens more with some easy shell help and a quick UI from Keyboard Maestro.

In my case, the UI has a button to List, Count or Remove the items in question. It then has a dropdown for the drive I want to work with. The results are a text window where I can confirm what's to be removed. If I like what I see, I can run the command again to delete them.

The command in question looks something like this:

filename="Sample*"
find * -iname "$filename" -type d
find * -iname "$filename" -type d | wc -l
#find * -iname "$filename" -type d -exec rm -rf {} +

I also set up a small util to show me the largest files. Again, it has a simple UI to pick the file size I'm interested in, such as 1GB, 5GB, 10GB. In this case, show me all the files larger than 5GB, since those might need to be dealt with. The executed shell command is:

find * -type f -size +"$KMVAR_instance_size"

As I find more and more files I don't need, I add them to my growing list. I can either execute them as shell command within Keyboard Maestro, or create an .sh shell script that processes them as a batch.

Using Keyboard Maestro allows me to make a helpful UI that fills in the parameters of the shell command and lets me get the work done without worrying about the syntax.

Now that I have my command set up, I can use it over and over again, across multiple drives and delete hundreds, if not thousands of files, and clean up a slew of files with a single click.