Dynamically (automatically) change the "download folder" in Safari

Question

Saft -- the (now seemingly defunct as of Safari 5.1) Safari plugin -- had the ability to change the name of the download folder (and create said folder if it didn't already exist) that Safari uses (e.g., by creating a name based on the date). This was incredibly useful for decluttering/ordering my downloads.

Is there any comparable feature in a supported Safari extension (for Safari 5.1)?

P.S. I know I can create a cron job to do this after the fact, but that seems kludgey and prone to errors because of file timestamps, automatically unpacked ZIP/tar/cpio files, etc.

Answer 1

I am using the Glims Safari Plugin (ver1.0b29) in Safari 5.1 (OSX Lion), which has the feature "Create dated folder for downloaded files".

Answer 2

I created my own "S/W Downloads" folder and put it in the Dock. I have it show as List, and there is an option to display by date, the newest being on top.

If that is sufficient, there is no need for Saft.

Answer 3

With the demise of Glims support (beyond Mavericks?), I broke down and wrote a cron job to automatically change the default download folder of Safari.

The crontab entries look like:

@reboot $HOME/bin/rotateDownloads
0 0 * * * $HOME/bin/rotateDownloads

The contents of rotateDownloads looks like:

#! /bin/ksh

NEWPATH=$HOME/downloads/$(date +%Y-%m-%d)
mkdir -p ${NEWPATH} && defaults write com.apple.Safari DownloadsPath ${NEWPATH}`#! /bin/ksh
OLDPATH=$HOME/downloads/$(date -v -1d +%Y-%m-%d)
rmdir ${OLDPATH} > /dev/null 2>&1  # remove old directory if empty

This seems to work on El Capitan (MacOS 10.11.4) with Safari 9.1.

Edit: Safari 13 seems to have broken this.

Answer 4

just Control click the download link