orazio-gallo-nvidia / foolproofrm

Fool-proof rm

Have you ever rm'ed something by mistake? It happens to the best of us, including the creators of Toy Story 2 (Try to Google "Toy Story 2 rm").
Fool-proof rm is a small tool to prevent exactly that. You use it and call it exactly like rm but, instead of permanently deleting files and folders, it time-stamps and moves them to its own trash folder. Similar tools either define a list of protected folders, or implement a trash managment that requires specific commands.

Usage

After installation, calling rm will move files or folders to the trash folder and prepend the time of deletion to the filename. The flags are the same as the native rm (see currently supported flags below). To permanently delete files (traditional, dangerous behavior) use the flag -D. The standard rm command can still be run using the fully qualified path (generally /bin/rm).

Supported flags

Flag	Supported/New	Comments
-D	New	Behave as traditional rm1
-E	New	Empty trash
-r	Yes	---
-f	Partial	Don't prompt for read-only files
-h	Yes	---
-v	Yes	---
-i	Not yet	---
--version	Not yet	---

¹ The rest of the flags are passed to rm directly. For instance, rm -Dfv testfile maps to /bin/rm -fv testfile.

Installation

Clone this repository and run:

bash install.sh
source ~/.bashrc

The installation simply creates an alias to the script that "shadows" rm making the use of fool-proof rm transparent to the user. No other change is made to the system. Of course, you can also create a different alias--the script is totally self-contained. Similarly, simply remove the rm alias in ~/.bash_aliases to uninstall.

Alternative tools

• safe-rm
  Prevents removal of a predefined list of folders.
• rm-protection
  Similar to safe-rm but asks for confirmation instead of preventing deletion.
• trash-cli
  Implements a trash system, though it has its own commands that differ from rm.