Downloads tidy: the root of ~/Downloads is an inbox

modules/home/services/downloads-tidy.nix.

Why this existsCopy Anchor Link

MEASURED on 28/10/2026, ~/Downloads held 34 GiB: 18 folders sorted by hand (UFSCAR, Financeiro, CVs and so on) and 26 files loose at the root, from PDFs to a 9.5 GiB game zip and a NixOS ISO. The folders were fine. The root was a pile, because sorting by hand only happens when the pile hurts.

The modelCopy Anchor Link

The root is an INBOX, a place things land and leave. Every 30 min a user timer moves each loose file that sat untouched for an hour into one folder per type, inside ~/Downloads itself:

The table lives in my.downloads.buckets; a new extension is one word there.

What it never touches:

• Folders. Only -maxdepth 1 -type f, so the hand-made folders (and mega/, which modules/home/network/mega.nix downloads into) stay exactly as they are.
• Running downloads. .part, .crdownload, .download, .tmp and hidden files are skipped, and a file must be older than settleMinutes (60) in BOTH mtime and ctime. ctime matters because a browser may stamp the server's old mtime on a file that landed a second ago.
• Existing files. A clash becomes name (2).ext, and mv -n guards the race.

The trash windowCopy Anchor Link

Installers and disk images can be downloaded again, so files in Installers/ and Disk-images/ go to the trash (trash-put, never rm) trashAfterDays (30) after they were SORTED. The clock is ctime, which the move resets, so a .deb whose server says 2019 does not vanish on arrival.

~/Downloads is outside restic (modules/nixos/services/restic.nix), so the trash is the only safety net. trash-expire (disk-hygiene) empties it after 30 more days: an installer is recoverable for 60 days after it was sorted. Nothing else is ever deleted.

Why not a ready-made toolCopy Anchor Link

Checked on 28/10/2026 against rule 24's ladder:

• organize is the reference (YAML rules, a sim dry run), but it is not in nixpkgs. Packaging a Python app with its dependency tree for ~60 lines of logic is the wrong trade.
• relfa (age-based archiving) is young and not packaged either.
• User systemd-tmpfiles rules only DELETE; they cannot sort.

So the rules are Nix (rung 1) generating a case in shell glue (rung 3).

The journalCopy Anchor Link

48 runs a day would bury the journal in systemd's Starting/Finished lines, the disk-hygiene lesson. SyslogLevel = notice plus LogLevelMax = notice keeps the script's own moved: and trashed: lines and cuts systemd's info-level noise. No desktop notification: one every 30 min is noise too.

Operating itCopy Anchor Link

downloads-tidy --dry-run                 # what it would move and trash, touching nothing
journalctl --user -u downloads-tidy      # what it did
systemctl --user list-timers downloads-tidy

To undo a move, the journal line names the source and the destination. To stop it, systemctl --user stop downloads-tidy.timer (until the next switch) or drop the import from modules/home/services/default.nix.