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Wednesday, May 18, 2022

Delete Me

Most computer systems divide data operations into two camps. One is file management where you deal with one package of data, like text document or an image, and the other is working with the data contained in a file. If you have a bunch of files in a directory, and you open up one to look at it and decide it's no longer useful, you might want to delete it. Well, first you need to close it, and now that it is closed, do you remember what the file name was?

Sure, you could delete the contents of the file which would get rid of the data, but the file would still be hanging around. If it was a text file, the length might be reduced to zero and you could use that bit of information to locate the problem child. Other file formats might not go to zero even when all their content is deleted.

In Google's Blogger and Drive, their cloud based file manager, you can rename the file you are currently working on, and you can do it within the editor, so my solution to getting rid of an unwanted file is to rename it to Delete Me. Close the file, and now when you look at the list of files (or blog posts), the offending item will stand out like a sore thumb. Well, it would if your sore thumb was named Delete Me.


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