safe-rm

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|_____  ||       ||    ___||    ___|       |    __  ||       |
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|_______||__| |__||___|    |_______|       |___|  |_||_|   |_|

Safe-rm, a drop-in and much safer replacement of the unix rm command with ALMOST FULL features of the original rm.

The project was initially developed on Mac OS X and has been continuously used by myself since then, with later testing conducted on Linux. If you encounter any issues during use, please feel free to submit an issue.

Features

• Supports both MacOS and Linux with full test coverage.
• Using safe-rm, the files or directories you choose to remove will be moved to the system Trash instead of simply deleting them. You could put them back whenever you want manually.
  • On MacOS, safe-rm will use AppleScript to delete files or directories as much as possible to enable the built-in "put-back" capability in the system Trash bin.
  • On Linux, it also follows the operating system's conventions for handling duplicate files in the Trash to avoid overwriting
• Supports Custom configurations.

Supported options

For those implemented options, safe-rm will act exactly the same as the original rm command:

| Option | Brief | Description | | ------ | ----- | ------------ | | -i, --interactive | Interactive | Prompts you to confirm before removing each file | | -I, --interactive=once | Less Interactive | Prompts only once before removing more than three files or when recursively removing directories | | -f, --force | Force | Removes files without prompting for confirmation, ignoring nonexistent files and overriding file protections | | -r, -R, --recursive, --Recursive | Recursive | Removes directories and their contents recursively. Required for deleting directories | | -v, --verbose | Verbose | Displays detailed information about each file or directory being removed | | -d, '--directory' | Remove Empty Directories | safe-rm can check and only remove empty directories specifically with this flag | | -- | End of Options | Used to indicate the end of options. Useful if a filename starts with a - |

Combined short options are also supported, such as

-rf, -riv, -rfv, etc

Usual Installation

Add an alias to your ~/.bashrc script,

alias rm='/path/to/bin/rm.sh'

and /path/to is where you git clone shell-safe-rm in your local machine.

Permanent Installation

If you have NPM (NodeJS) installed (RECOMMENDED):

npm i -g safe-rm

Or by using the source code, within the root of the current repo (not recommended, may be unstable):

# If you have NodeJS installed
npm link

# If you don't have NodeJS or npm installed
make && sudo make install

# For those who have no `make` command:
sudo sh install.sh

Installing safe-rm will put safe-rm in your /bin directory. In order to use safe-rm, you need to add an alias to your ~/.bashrc script and in all yours currently open terminals, like this:

alias rm='safe-rm'

After installation and alias definition, when you execute rm command in the Terminal, lines of below will be printed:

$ rm
safe-rm
usage: rm [-f | -i] [-dPRrvW] file ...
     unlink file

which helps to tell safe-rm from the original rm.

Uninstall

First remove the alias rm=... line from your ~/.bashrc file, then

npm uninstall -g safe-rm

Or

make && sudo make uninstall

Or

sudo sh uninstall.sh

Advanced Sections

Configuration

Since 3.0.0, you could create a configuration file located at ~/.safe-rm/config in your $HOME directory, to support

• defining your custom trash directory
• allowing safe-rm to permanently delete files and directories that are already in the trash
• disallowing safe-rm to use AppleScript

For the description of each config, you could refer to the sample file here

# You could
cp -r ./.safe-rm ~/

If you want to use a custom configuration file

alias="SAFE_RM_CONFIG=/path/to/safe-rm.conf /path/to/shell-safe-rm/bin/rm.sh"

Or if it is installed by npm:

alias="SAFE_RM_CONFIG=/path/to/safe-rm.conf safe-rm"

Disable Put-back Functionality on MacOS (MacOS only)

In ~/.safe-rm/config

export SAFE_RM_USE_APPLESCRIPT=no

By default, on MacOS, safe-rm uses AppleScript as much as possible so that removed files could be put back from system Trash app.

Change the Default Trash Bin Other Than System Default

export SAFE_RM_TRASH=/path/to/trash

Permanent Delete Files or Directories that Are Already in the Trash

export SAFE_RM_PERM_DEL_FILES_IN_TRASH=yes

Protect Files And Directories From Deleting

If you want to protect some certain files or directories from deleting by mistake, you could create a .gitignore file under the "~/.safe-rm/" directory, you could write .gitignore rules inside the file.

If a path is matched by the rules that defined in ~/.safe-rm/.gitignore, the path will be protected and could not be deleted by safe-rm

For example, in the ~/.safe-rm/.gitignore

/path/to/be/protected

And when executing

$ safe-rm /path/to/be/protected           # or
$ safe-rm /path/to/be/protected/foo       # or
$ safe-rm -rf /path/to/be/protected/bar

# An error will occur

But pay attention that, by adding the protected pattern above, if we:

$ safe-rm -rf /path/to

To keep the performance of safe-rm and avoid conducting unnecessary file system traversing, this would not prevent /path/to/be/protected/foo from removing.

Pay ATTENTION that:

• Before adding protected rules, i.e. placing the ".gitignore" inside the "~/.safe-rm/" directory, it requires git to be installed in your environment
• The ".gitignore" patterns apply to the root directory ("/"), which means that the patterns defined within it need to be relative to the root directory.
• Avoid adding / in the protected rules file, or everything will be protected