We are in the process of pruning our directories to recuperate some disk space.

The 'algorithm' for the pruning/backup process consists of a list of directories and, for each one of them, a set of rules, e.g. 'compress *.bin', 'move *.blah', 'delete *.crap', 'leave *.important'; these rules change from directory to directory but are well known. The compressed and moved files are stored in a temporary file system, burned onto a blue ray, tested within the blue ray, and, finally, deleted from their original locations.

I am doing this in Python (basically a walk statement with a dictionary with the rules for each extension in each folder).

Do you recommend a better methodology for pruning file systems? How do you do it?

We run on Linux.