I regularly amass a mass of junk files in my ~/public_html that I don't need. Most of these were uploaded to share something on IRC / email / IM, and aren't needed after some number of days. To address this, I wrote a small garbage collector in C. Its file retention period is shamelessly stolen from the kind folks at and , with the exception that files larger than max_size are kept for a fxed number of days before being deleted. SETUP: Edit the paths in cleanup.c compile cleanup.c: gcc -o tmpclean -lm cleanup.c add a daily cronjob that calls cleanup USAGE: cleanup -v verbose -n dry run -x filename exclude filename from cleanup TO UPLOAD: I have a flaky shell script 'ptmp' that scps files to the right directory with a temporary filename.