Folders with "expiration date"

[jgpaiva]

Well... A friend of mine asked me for one interesting piece of software.
Something that would create folders with "expiration date".
These folders would have the interesting feature that would be time limited, and after that time was expired, they'd be deleted.

The idea is that sometimes you have stuff that you know you won't need after some time, thus, you could just dump those in one of these temporary folders, and it'd be deleted for you.
The objective is to avoid clutter with unnecessary files, if you already know for how much time you'll need those.

So... 2 questions:
Any Sugestions on how to implement this? (I was thinking about having a program that would monitor a folder tree, and when the user created some kind of file with info about the "expiration date" of a folder, it'd be monitored and deleted when necessary).
And..
Would you use this?

Thank you!

[mouser]

this is a fun idea.

i am always paranoid about programs that delete folders with stuff in them.

a minor modification to the idea might be, what if you had a program that either kept track of folders you told it to delete at a certain date, or else scanned directories for a special helper file like ScheduledAction.txt

and then you ran this program occasionally and it would look for this file in certain directories or else it would just have its own list of dirs to delete at certain dates, and then would prompt the user with a list of what it is about to do and get approval (or let the user do it manually and just have the program act as a reminder/helper).

[app103]

Or a program that would allow you to drag & drop folders to it and set an expiration date for that folder, and when that date hit, it would move them to a 'smart bin', adding the delete date to the folder name, rather than moving them to the recycle bin or complete removal. (it would just be a special folder somewhere for this purpose)

After the size of that folder hits a certain mark, the application would warn you and show you a list of what was deleted & when, and you could choose which to permanently delete. This list and 'smart bin' would also allow you to restore stuff if you needed it.

[f0dder]

I'd keep information of "watched folders" in some global database file, to avoid having to scan all partitions for those folders, which would be dog slow. And rather than deleting the folders, the program should pop up a reminder once the expiration date is hit.

But all this would still require Yet Another Always Running App^TM, or at least that the monitor app is called regularly from the windows task scheduler thingy.

[justice]

Can you not create/generate a one-time scheduled task for the deletion/moving/renaming of the folder at the said time the user requested? the scheduler is already running and offers you the flexibility of error codes, triggers and what not.

[f0dder]

Can you not create/generate a one-time scheduled task for the deletion/moving/renaming of the folder at the said time the user requested? the scheduler is already running and offers you the flexibility of error codes, triggers and what not.

-justice (July 03, 2007, 06:14 PM)

Yeah, you could do that, but then you might end up with a lot of entries for the task scheduler, depending on how frenzied the user is