bashrc function to create a folder every month and switch XDG_DESKTOP_DIR to it

Question

I am actively using desktop, so files and folders rapidly accumulate on desktop.

I need a bashrc way that it checks month on the first day then creates a directory with month name, finally sets it desktop.

Answer 1

• you can set up a cronjob, that runs a script of your daily: man crontab
• in the script you:
  • create a folder for the last month on your desktop: man mkdir and How do I assign last month's date (year and month only - 2016-07) as a variable?
  • you run a find that finds all files that are older than one month. Here's an example of a find that deletes (rm) older files - you'll need to adapt it to mv older files into the created directory: Delete files older than X days +

Answer 2

First manually change the config by yourself for this month and run this for the next month.

change_desktop()
{
month=$(date +%B)
last_month=$(date '+%B' --date '1 month ago')
mkdir /home/$USER/Desktop/$month
sed -i "s|Desktop/$last_month|Desktop/$month|" ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs 
}

This will create the current month's folder in Desktop and then look for the last month in the config and change it to the current month.

I don't know how to run this piece automatically using the ~/.bashrc, but you can setup a cron job for the user and let it run every month. Just add this code snippet to a file called change_desktop.sh add the following code :

#!/bin/sh
change_desktop()
{
month=$(date +%B)
last_month=$(date '+%B' --date '1 month ago')
mkdir /home/$USER/Desktop/$month
sed -i "s|Desktop/$last_month|Desktop/$month|" ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs 
}
change_desktop

Then create a cron job for the current user like this :

0 0 12 * * sh /home/$USER/change_desktop.sh

If however you want to do this manually, you can add the first code snippet to the ~/.bashrc and run change_desktop in your terminal and it will do the job for you, as it is already a function in your ~/.bashrc.

Answer 3

I have managed to concoct my own script.

new_desktop="$HOME/Desktop/$(LC_ALL=tr_TR.utf8 date +'%B-%Y')"
if [ ! -d "$new_desktop" ]; then  
   mkdir "$new_desktop" 
   xdg-user-dirs-update --set DESKTOP "$new_desktop"
   nautilus -q
fi

But I doubt about how reliable it is.