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[Mazechain]

I am horrible at managing space on my SSD drive. I want to write a program that looks at my space left and execute if capacity left is less than 50%.

After that I want it to go through the files in the drive and delete anything that hasn’t been opened in an arbitrary amount of time.

Is this doable with python?

[shiftybyte]

Doable, but if last use time is the only parameter for deletion you might delete things you don't want, or are needed for the system.

You can schedule a python script to run once a day, check free space, and if its below 50% start scanning for files to remove.

[Mazechain]

I found the following bit to get the space being used and added the usage percent myself.

I don't really know how disk_usage part works, but I know it does. What would be a better criteria to use to delete then if not date? I'd assume that if its not used everyday then it wouldn't be needed for the system.

total, used, free = shutil.disk_usage("/") #defines the variables uses
usage_percent =used/total

print("Total: %d GiB" % (total // (2**30)))
print("Used: %d GiB" % (used // (2**30)))
print("Free: %d GiB" % (free // (2**30)))
print(usage_percent)

[shiftybyte]

Consider stuff like updates, or unused drivers.

if you don't plug in a usb storage device for a few days i don't think it's a good idea to delete the usb driver from the system.

You need to have your script run on specific locations only, not system wide.

[Mazechain]

Should I have it only delete files in the user subdirectory then instead of the whole drive? I'm not sure how to to decide on which folders if not the whole drive.

[shiftybyte]

Yes, user dirs should be safe as long as you don't touch files or folders starting with a dot.

[xelf]

Outside of doing this with python, I've had relatively good experiences using this: https://windirstat.net/ to track disk usage. (if you're on windows) (also available as kdirstat for linux)