rq is a drop-in replacement for rm that's 2-4x faster. Built with Bun and optimized for parallel I/O operations.

# Instead of: rm -rf node_modules
rq -rf node_modules  # 2-4x faster!

Why rq?

| Scenario | rm | rq | Speedup | |----------|------|------|---------| | Delete node_modules (10k files) | 17.9s | 7.5s | 2.4x | | Deep nested directories | 50ms | 13ms | 3.9x | | Bulk file deletion | 860ms | 382ms | 2.3x |

Installation

# With bun (recommended)
bun install -g rq-rm

# With npm
npm install -g rq-rm

Usage

rq is fully compatible with rm. Just replace rm with rq:

# Delete files
rq file.txt
rq file1.txt file2.txt file3.txt

# Delete directories (recursive)
rq -r directory/
rq -rf node_modules/   # Force + recursive

# Verbose mode
rq -rv build/          # See what's being deleted

# Interactive mode
rq -i important.txt    # Prompt before deletion

Options

| Flag | Long Form | Description | |------|-----------|-------------| | -f | --force | Ignore nonexistent files, never prompt | | -r | --recursive | Remove directories and their contents | | -R | | Same as -r | | -d | --dir | Remove empty directories | | -v | --verbose | Explain what is being done | | -i | | Prompt before every removal | | -I | | Prompt once before removing >3 files | | -x | --one-file-system | Stay on one file system | | | --preserve-root | Do not remove / (default) | | | --no-preserve-root | Allow removing / | | | --help | Display help | | | --version | Display version |

Benchmarks

Tested on macOS with SSD storage:

============================================================
                      BENCHMARK RESULTS
============================================================

| Test                        | rm (ms)  | rq (ms)  | Speedup |
|-----------------------------|----------|----------|---------|
| small (30 files)            |     4.09 |     1.36 |  3.01x  |
| medium (620 files)          |    53.91 |    25.54 |  2.11x  |
| large (10k files, nested)   | 17961.89 |  7490.67 |  2.40x  |
| flat-10k                    |   860.10 |   382.04 |  2.25x  |
| flat-50k                    |  5527.96 |  3573.26 |  1.55x  |
| deep (200 files, 20 levels) |    49.89 |    12.80 |  3.90x  |
| wide (15.5k files)          |  1280.38 |   544.74 |  2.35x  |

Overall Average Speedup: 2.51x

Run benchmarks yourself:

bun run benchmark

How It Works

1. Parallel I/O: Files are deleted concurrently using Promise.all(), saturating disk I/O bandwidth
2. Sync Traversal: Directory tree is walked synchronously to minimize Promise overhead
3. Bun Native: Leverages Bun's optimized filesystem APIs for maximum performance
4. Zero Dependencies: No external dependencies, just pure Bun

Development

# Clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/tryosschat/rq.git
cd rq

# Install dependencies
bun install

# Run tests
bun test

# Run benchmarks
bun run benchmark

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.

License

MIT License - see LICENSE for details.