One of the things I have been meaning to implement on my system is a way to properly "remove" old files from the system. Currently, I do this through frequently listing all files, going through them and deleting those I feel I no longer need (in any case, I can retrieve them back from the backup within 60 days). But this isn't always easy since it requires me to reopen the files and consider what I want to do with them... again.

Most of the time, when files are created, you generally know how long they are needed on the system. For instance, an attachment you download from an e-mail to view usually has a very short lifespan (you can always re-retrieve it from the e-mail as long as the e-mail itself isn't removed). Same with output you captured from a shell command, a strace logfile, etc. So I'm wondering if I can't create a simple method for keeping track of expiration dates on files, similar to the expiration dates supported for z/OS data sets. And to implement this, I am considering to use extended attributes.

The idea is simple: when working with a file, I want to be able to immediately set an expiration date to it:

$ strace -o strace.log ...
$ expdate +7d strace.log

This would set an extended attribute named user.expiration with the value being the number of seconds since epoch (which you can obtain through date +%s if you want) on which the file can be expired (and thus deleted from the system). A system cronjob can then regularly scan the system for files with the extended attribute set and, if the expiration date is beyond the current date, the file can be removed from the system (perhaps first into a specific area where it lingers for an additional while just in case).

It is just an example of course. The idea is that the extended attributes keep information about the file close to the file itself. I'm probably going to have an additional layer on top if it, checking SELinux contexts and automatically identifying expiration dates based on their last modification time. Setting the expiration dates manually after creating the files is prone to be forgotten after a while. And perhaps introduce the flexibility of setting an user.expire_after attribute is well, telling that the file can be removed if it hasn't been touched (modification time) in at least XX number of days.