Keeping your “My Documents” folder clean
I came across this fix awhile ago, used it, and then forgot about it, but I’m realizing that many other people are still suffering from the same ailment, so here’s the fix again. But first, I need to explain what I’m talking about.
The GPGnet multiplayer client automatically stores game data statistics about every multiplayer game you play. This is of quite questionable usefulness, of course (how often is anyone really every looking at these things anyway?), but as long as those files are just squirreled away out of sight and don’t bother you it’s okay, right? The only problem is that the default save location for all of these files is (or was) your My Documents folder. Not some subdirectory of My Documents, mind you. The folder itself. So after playing a couple multiplayer games, you’ll get all sorts of directories named “Game1″, “Game2″, etc., in there.
I used to just periodically clear out these directories by deleting them, but then I discovered the fix. In GPGnet, go to Tools->Options->Supreme Commander and find the “Statistics Save Folder” field. Change it to something out of the way. Now unfortunately this isn’t under Linux, because I’d prefer being able to send the files to /dev/null. As far as I know, Windows doesn’t have a null file output device. Sigh. Having an option in GPGnet to turn off this kind of reporting altogether would be next choice.
June 26th, 2007 at 10:01 am
Thanks, I had been wondering about that for a while.
June 26th, 2007 at 10:08 am
Windows does have a null device, called NUL. You could try to “abuse” it as a directory. It’s a magic filename, so if an application were to try to write a file named “NUL.TXT”, it would go to NUL. If it were “PRN.TXT”, it’d go to the printer, some other ones are CON and AUX. You cannot rename a file to these, even in WinXP, so the magic still exists.
June 26th, 2007 at 10:09 am
What I mean is that the Magic persists even if you do stuff to the filename / extension / path. MAYBE you can work with this.
June 26th, 2007 at 11:34 am
Hey, that’s actually really cool. I did not know you could do that. That’s pretty kick-ass.
June 26th, 2007 at 2:28 pm
so Thygrrr, does that mean instead of any kind of path or filename, I would just simply put NUL there? or is it at a specific path?
June 26th, 2007 at 5:41 pm
I’ve added don’t save these ever to our issues list of additions. Not as cool as /dev/null though =)
June 26th, 2007 at 7:11 pm
Lol I have 782 game folders… Go me.
June 26th, 2007 at 9:54 pm
cant you put in in your temp directory ? it will be deleted in a day or so by windows then
July 6th, 2007 at 8:58 am
Thanks for that nugget of info :)
July 15th, 2007 at 12:11 am
Good to know this can be fixed. Thanks.