unburden-home-dir allows users to move cache files from browsers,
etc. off their home directory, i.e. on a local harddisk or tmpfs and
replace them with a symbolic link to the new location (e.g. on /tmp/
or /scratch/) upon login. Optionally the contents of the directories
and files can be removed instead of moved.

This is helpful in at least three cases:

The idea-giving case are big workstation setups where $HOME is on NFS
and all those caches put an unnecessary burden (hence the name) on the
file server since caching over NFS doesn't have the best performance
and may clog the NFS server, too.

The second case are devices with small disk space but a lot of RAM as
seen often on boxes with flash disks or early netbooks, especially the
EeePC, where configurations with 4GB disk space and 2GB RAM are not
seldom. In this case you want to move off cache files, etc. to some
tmpfs filesystem, e.g. /tmp/.

The third case is to keep those files in places where they don't get
backed up and so don't take up backup disk space. In that case it's an
alternative to keeping the blacklist in your backup software
up-to-date.

This project initially started as an Xsession hook. It now consists of
a shell script which optionally can also be called from a provided
Xsession hook.

See http://wiki.phys.ethz.ch/readme/application_cache_files for the
detailed reasoning behind this project.

You should always find the newest code via git at either
http://git.phys.ethz.ch/?p=unburden_home_dir.git (primary site),
http://gitorious.org/unburden-home-dir/ or
http://github.com/xtaran/unburden_home_dir (mirrors, or in case you
prefer to use social forking :-).

See etc/ (or /usr/share/doc/unburden-home-dir/examples/ on debianoid
installations) for example files.

Explanation of the unburden_home_dir_list file format:

1st column: Action ("d, "r", or "m": delete/remove or move)
2nd column: Type ("d", "D", "f" or "F": directory or file, capital
	    letter means "create it if it doesn't exist")
3rd column: Path relative to $HOME to move off to some other location
4th column: identifier for file or directory in the other location


Edit /etc/default/unburden-home-dir if you want to enable
unburden-home-dir for all users of a machine.on an Xsession based
login. But please be aware that if you do that on a machine with NFS
homes, you should do that on all (Unix) machines which have those NFS
homes mounted.

License:

All stuff in here is free software: you can redistribute it and/or
modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 2 of the
License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but
WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU
General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program in the file COPYING.  If not, see
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.
