safe-rm

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

Safe-rm, a much safer replacement of rm with ALMOST FULL features of the origin rm command.

The project was initially developed for Mac OS X, and then tested on Linux.

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 2.0.0, you could create a configuration file named .safe-rm.conf 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

If you want to use a custom configuration file

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

Or if it is installed by npm:

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