Remove unneeded historical files

You may have backups.

Every day, your precious stuff is saved in a safe place.

But you may have too much of that...

This script will select for you what files to drop, based on a retention policy such that as files get older you can keep less of them. The default policy will keep all the files in the last two weeks, a file every week for the last three months, a file every month for the last year, a file every year forever.

The script takes in input the existing files on command line and by default will print on stdout the files to delete. You can use a chain of commands such as:

ls | xargs weeder | xargs rm

to run in a cron job every day to keep your backup directories light.

Our glorious help

Running weeder -h you might be told:

usage: weeder [-h] [-p AGE:DIST [AGE:DIST ...]] [-f REGEX] [-r YYYY-MM-DD]
              [--print-keepers | --print-goners] [-q | -v]
              [FILE [FILE ...]]

positional arguments:
  FILE                  the files to weed

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -p AGE:DIST [AGE:DIST ...], --policy AGE:DIST [AGE:DIST ...]
                        state that, of every file older than AGE days, we want
                        to keep at least one every DIST days
                        [default: 14:7 84:28 364:364]
  -f REGEX, --format REGEX
                        the pattern to extract a date from a file name
                        [default: (\d{4})-(\d{2})-(\d{2})]
  -r YYYY-MM-DD, --refdate YYYY-MM-DD
                        reference date to establish retention [default: today]
  --print-keepers       print the files to keep
  --print-goners        print the files to delete [default]
  -q, --quiet           talk less
  -v, --verbose         talk more

but who knows, really.

Running tests

You can run:

python3 setup.py test