AutoPurge™ is a small application that removes any unused items from the invisible "Temporary Items" folders on all mounted disks. In the past (Mac OS 8.6 and earlier), these items were removed by the OS itself, and placed in the trash. This is not the case in Mac OS 9.0. Applications place scratch items, cached, and other data in this folder, and then remove them when quit. If your Macintosh crashes while running these programs, those files are left behind. This can eat up LOTS of disk space in a short amount of time. If you are running low on disk space, but can't quite figure out why, this may be the case.
AutoPurge is a simple solution to this problem. AutoPurge launches, checks the folders, looks at each item in the folder, and if it isn't currently in use, moves it to the Trash, then quits. All you have to do is empty the Trash. This is how the Mac is supposed to work. I recommend placing this item in your Startup Items folder inside the System folder to automatically launch at each startup.
NOTE: Sometimes AutoPurge doesn't get all the files it should the first time. I am working on a fix for this, but I still recommend using this application. If used at each startup, it WILL get all the files eventually. Also, you may have a lot of files right now, if the folder has never been cleaned out, but once it has, there should never be more than 2 or 3 files in there anyway, and AutoPurge will get those just fine.
AutoPruge™ is Absolutely Freeware. Feel free to redistribute at your will. You do not have to contact the author of this application for any reason whatsoever. It may NOT, however, be redistributed for commercial use either in it's original or modified state. In other words, you can't make ANY money from this application. It can be added to a commercial bundle, but the price of the bundle must not include ANY charges for this application whatsoever.
Needless to say, while I do not believe this application can do any harm to your computer, the author and StimpSoft™, Inc. are NOT responsible for any damages to you or your Macintosh. 'Nuff said.
Requirements: PPC Macintosh, Mac OS 8.0 or higher, 4mb RAM.
Changes:
Version 1.1: Fixed the bug that may cause AutoPurge™ to skip one or two files.
Version 2.0: Added a counter of the number of dead files that have been purged. Look under the "Purging Temporary Items folders..." text.
Note: Version 1.1.2 and 2.0 are the same. I decided to go with the number posted to the internet. Sorry for all the confusion.
Version 2.1: NEW OPTION! Pressing the "D" key while AutoPurge™ is running will turn on/off the ability to automatically DELETE the files instead of movng them to a folder in the Trash. This setting is saved in a preferences file. The AutoPurge™ window will notify you if Auto Delete is turned on.
John Schilling,
StimpSoft™, Inc.
johnnycat@mac.com
Thanks to Jim Riggs for his excellent FileManager plugin for checking the "In Use" status of a file easily. Also thanks to "Jacques" for the Auto Delete suggestion, Frederico for the help in debugging, and everyone who patiently waited while if fixed all my mistakes.
