Delete default folders: Documents, Public, etc — permanently

deletingfolders

I do not use the folders ~/{Downloads, Documents, Public} and so I remove them. But some Mac OS X process keeps recreating them.

How can I disable the creation of these folders permanently? What process(es) are creating them?

Note: I do download files, e.g. from Safari, but they then go to a different directory.
Safari allows this to be customized, so why can't the default directory be erased?

Note: I have run a crontab to delete these folders on a routine basis, however this
is not a satisfactory solution especially since it needs to be run by root or an administrator.

Best Answer

It's definitively not recommended to remove these directories because a lot of applications just assume they are there. But it's your computer of course, so you can do with it whatever you like.

Instead of hunting down all applications/processes which might recreate these folders you could change their properties to make them invisible in Finder and inaccessible for everything :

chflags hidden ~/{Downloads,Documents,Public}
chmod 000 ~/{Downloads,Documents,Public}

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Art,

Do you have this working successfully?

Have you tried hiding the folders using something like:

chflags hidden ~/Documents

Then creating a link to it such as (in Terminal):

cd ~
mkdir stuff
cd stuff
ln -s ~/Documents

I believe that this will hide the ~/Documents folder from the Finder but it will still be there so anything writing to it will work OK. In addition you will see the link in ~/stuff...

IPhone – How to Permanently Delete Photos from iPhone

Presuming you're not looking to securely delete these photos, just recover space that they're consuming, as suggested by your original question, let's just start simply...

Aside from the suggestions by superriku11, including using iPhoto to transfer them off with the delete option and Image Capture, you do realize that you can, in Photos in your Camera Roll select Edit and then proceed to select a series of photos and then Delete them. This is time consuming for lots of photos, but does allow you directly on the iPhone to get rid of images you may no longer want to keep. This is the obvious solution to getting rid of multiple images at once but some people forget about it. Realize that if you delete a photo in the Camera Roll that's in an Album it goes away there too. You can delete albums using the Edit button, but this keeps images in the Camera Roll.

If you want to get rid of all the photos in your Camera Roll all at once, go into Settings > General > Usage under Storage click Photos & Camera and the right swipe Camera Roll to bring up a Delete button. Give it some time and it will delete all your photos in the Camera Roll. Likewise you could delete all the photos in your Photo Library and/or Photo Stream the same way.

Best Answer

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