Awesome
safe-rm
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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 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
- On MacOS,
- 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 Trach 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 requiresgit
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