this post was submitted on 19 Jul 2024
175 points (98.3% liked)
Asklemmy
43939 readers
432 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You don't actually have to set all the modification dates to now, you can pick any other timestamp you want. So to preserve the order of the files, you could just have the script sort the list of files by date, then update the modification date of the oldest file to some fixed time ago, the second-oldest to a bit later, and so on.
You could even exclude recently-edited files because the real modification dates are probably more relevant for those. For example, if you only process files older than 3 months, and update those starting from "6 months old"^1^, that just leaves remembering to run that script at least once a year or so. Just pick a date and put a recurring reminder in your calendar.
^1^: I picked 6 months there to leave some slack, in case you procrastinate your next run or it's otherwise delayed because you're out sick or on vacation or something.
Change the date on all the files by scaling to fit the oldest file. Scale to 1 year as a safe maximum age. So if the oldest file is 1.5 years old, scale all files to be t/1.5 duration prior to now.