Stop Using `rm` in Bash. Use `del`

35 points by raibosome 7 years ago | 74 comments

We’ve all had our fair share of accidentally removing files. Instead of

  rm my_file.txt

  rm -rf my_folder

we do

  del my_file.txt

  del my_folder

where you can define your Bash alias for `del` in ~/.custom_aliases as

  function del() {
      mv $* ~/.Trash
  }

which simply moves your files/folders to the trash such that you can recover them easily later.

What’s your alternative?

floatingatoll 7 years ago |

While not an alternative, please bugfix your bash:

mv "$@" ~/.Trash/

https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck/wiki/SC2086

dan-robertson 7 years ago | |

Even simpler:

  alias del="mv -t ~/.Trash/"

chipironcin 7 years ago | | |

Now let's delete them after roughtly 30 days:

  alias del="mv -t ~/.Trash/ ; find ~/.Trash/ -mtime +30 -exec rm {} \;"

floatingatoll 7 years ago | | |

This fails on non-GNU mv(1) binaries such as macOS.

raibosome 7 years ago | |

Thanks for pointing out! Now everyone’s Bashing me in their comments.

futureastronaut 7 years ago | |

I love how OP's "safe" rm can lead to data loss.

floatingatoll 7 years ago | | |

How so?

WCSTombs 7 years ago |

For Linux users: also look into the trash-cli [1] package, which complies with the FreeDesktop.org trash specification and remembers the original path, etc. so that trash items can be restored even with filename collisions. Then it's

    trash-put my_file.txt

[1] https://github.com/andreafrancia/trash-cli

pizza234 7 years ago | |

Until at least an year ago, the Ubuntu version (and likely, the upstream on), wouldn't work on certain filesystems.

I'm not sure about the current state, but one needs to test is very carefully before using it.

floatingatoll 7 years ago | | |

Which filesystem were you using when you encountered trouble with it? What happened when you tried to use it? Did it warn you about the filesystem issue? Did it delete rather than trash?

everdrive 7 years ago |

I've never liked the idea of a trashcan, and usually shift-delete when I'm in the gui. Deleting shouldn't be done casually, but a ui shouldn't second guess a user any more than it has to.

taneq 7 years ago | |

I habitually shift+delete too, but I won't say I've never made a mistake.

It's much less hazardous doing this when everything is in source control, though. :)

orev 7 years ago | |

This fails in the GUI in cases such as if you accidentally hit navigation keys close to the Del key, like Home, End, etc. In those cases you may accidentally change the file selection in the same movement as the deletion, and then you whack the wrong file.

If you’re the person in charge of making the delete operation the best and safest it can be, you do not have the luxury of yelling at users to just be more careful, because the data shows very plainly that doesn’t work (despite this being the approach most IT people seem to think is acceptable). In this role, with these constraints, the inevitable conclusion is the make a trash can.

caf 7 years ago |

This is going to cause you pain if the tree you're "deleting" is on a different filesystem to ~ and too big...

surfsvammel 7 years ago |

rm is for removing stuff. If you don’t want to remove the file, use mv.

Take care when entering commands, if it’s important that you don’t mess up, spend an extra second. Don’t run around shooting rm -rf as super user.

With great powers comes great responsibility.

joelthelion 7 years ago | |

Would be nice if filesystems were garbage collected, though. I don't see a fundamental reason why rm couldn't be undoable the second after you issue it.

majewsky 7 years ago | | |

It usually is: http://extundelete.sourceforge.net

Volundr 7 years ago | | |

Check out nilfs, where this is explicit. Every filesystem action results in a checkpoint, and checkpoints are garbage collected only as-needed to maintain free space.

tyfon 7 years ago | | |

Most have SSD drives now that trims the space on delete. Not sure how easy it is to mark regions on the SSD for "undelete" when it has been trimmed. In some cases the deleted region of the drive may even be mapped to another place on the memory chip itself to cycle it.

amelius 7 years ago |

Or use a snapshotting filesystem, so you can simply go back in time if you mess up.

zipperhead 7 years ago | |

I use borg backup running via cron multiple passes per day. When needed you can mount any backup as a file system for easy restoration. Yes, short-lived files can't be recovered, but that's something I am willing to live with.

sexyflanders 7 years ago |

My “alternative” to rm is to use mv directly. I just mv files aside whenever I am not 100% confident they are safe/ready to delete permanently.

Personally I’m not a fan of shell environment customizations like this because they are often fragile and may vary between systems. I like to know exactly what commands I’m executing.

JohnFen 7 years ago | |

> Personally I’m not a fan of shell environment customizations like this because they are often fragile and may vary between systems.

True. I gave up the practice entirely many years ago for a slightly different reason -- I need to use many different systems on a regular basis, and don't want to get used to using something custom that won't exist on random system X without customizing it, too.

Often, I prefer predictability and stability over convenience.

skyriser 7 years ago |

I like using the ‘trash’ command through Homebrew, on macOS Terminal:

http://hasseg.org/trash/

devnonymous 7 years ago |

> What's your alternative?

When I execute rm I mean to delete. When I'm not sure I expyre[1] the path: https://github.com/lonetwin/expyre

[1] shameless plug -- but you did ask ;-)

phunehehe0 7 years ago |

I too have my share of reinventing the trash functionality :)

garbage-io has some features that scratch my own itches:

- Trash files with the same name without clashing - Delete things from trash directory base on deletion time and file size - Hide the deleted files/directories before moving them, in case moving them takes a long time (I later think this was a bit over the top...) - The smart deletion can also be used for e.g. ~/Downloads

I do feel that a better approach would be something that works alongside the trash functionality instead of replacing it, though.

https://gitlab.com/phunehehe/garbage-io

towaway1138 7 years ago |

My alternative is to think carefully before hitting return. As a bonus, this works for other commands, too.

Also, '\rm', as many distributions insist on aliasing 'rm' by default.

alexandernst 7 years ago |

How do you manage your ".Trash" folder? Who is in charge of deleting it's content? Do you do it periodically or based on some other event?

emondi 7 years ago |

I move to /tmp and it gets deleted on next reboot.

floatingatoll 7 years ago | |

/tmp is a ramdisk on some systems, which makes this particular approach a very risky endeavor to use as a global replacement for ‘rm’ as the OP suggests.

emondi 7 years ago | | |

Sure, also it works for me because it is on a system that is frequently turned off. If it would have to stay on for a long time it would fill /tmp with garbage.

clircle 7 years ago |

If you spend most of your time in emacs, and like to delete/move files in dired, you can use

(setq delete-by-moving-to-trash t)

to achieve the same effect.

Volundr 7 years ago |

nilfs2 is my alternative. It's a log-based filesystem that results in continuous checkpoints that can be upgraded to mountable snapshots at any time. Realized you blew away a file you needed? Made large modifications you wish you hadn't? Just find an earlier checkpoint and your good to go.

Backups too. Nothing replaces backups.

JohnFen 7 years ago |

I dislike the trash bin enough that I intentionally disable it, so personally, I'm perfectly happy with using rm.

mykowebhn 7 years ago |

This can be a pain if you're deleting many files, but

  alias rm='rm -i'

has worked for me.

raibosome 7 years ago | |

Okay I think this is more elegant than my workaround. But it doesn’t work for directories, does it?

mykowebhn 7 years ago | | |

BTW, if I'm absolutely sure I want to delete all the files in a directory and all subdirectories, and I don't want to bother with a gazillion prompts, I can override the alias with a backslash, as in "\rm -r *". Use with extreme caution, though. Otherwise, your solution of putting into Trash is probably better and safer.

mykowebhn 7 years ago | | |

When I execute "rm -r" with that alias, it does prompt me before deleting directories, at least on Mac OS.

Daviey 7 years ago |

I already have an alternative for Windows users. Doesn't provide any data retention mechanism, but still helpful:

  $ ls -l /usr/local/bin/del
  lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 Mar 18 12:46 /usr/local/bin/del -> /usr/games/sl

molecule 7 years ago |

Or “How I Filled Up /home By ‘Deleting’ A Larger Amount Of Data From A Larger Volume”

goshx 7 years ago |

This was one of the first things I realized I had to do back when I installed a Red Hat 3.0 for the first time.

My alias was for rm itself. I replaced it completely, as the habit of using rm is hard to forget. Today I don’t use an alias anymore.

saagarjha 7 years ago |

Time Machine.

floatingatoll 7 years ago | |

For the unaware, Time Machine is the macOS built-in backup system. Once configured, it takes frequent filesystem snapshots and syncs them to a connected storage device. If the file being removed is included by those backups, and existed long enough to be in a snapshot, then you can restore it from the TM backup. Neither of those criteria are guaranteed, as when working with files in a Terminal or bash script you can easily create and remove files with names and/or locations that exempt them.

raibosome 7 years ago |

As pointed out, the alias should be

  function del() {
    mv “$@“ ~/.Trash
  }

instead. Thanks @floatingatoll!

banana_giraffe 7 years ago | |

And if you copy and paste that version, it won't work either.

Also, be aware this will silently delete older files with name collisions.

_nosaj 7 years ago |

I've used a tool called 'trash' on OSX for a few years:

`brew install trash`

ivansavz 7 years ago |

What would be the fish shell equivalent alias/function?

pipogld 7 years ago |

I have backups..

floatingatoll 7 years ago | |

Either your backups run continuously on every inode change (see nilfs elsethread), or there’s a window of risk where you create a file and then remove it before your backups run.

cleanyourroom 7 years ago |

`alias rm='rm -rf /'`

karmakaze 7 years ago |

Use `git`, use `rm`.

Upvoter33 7 years ago |

Dropbox

fxfan 7 years ago |

I wish something like this were built into kernel filesystem driver. All deletions automatically go to this specific place in the filesystem.

devnonymous 7 years ago | |

...and then how do you delete it from that specific place when you are sure you want it gone? A new syscall?

In seriousness tho, if you're ever wondering why such and such thing is not builtin into the kernel read up on separation of policy and mechanism eg:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_mechanism_and_...

JohnFen 7 years ago | |

I would hate that behavior, so if it's brought into Linux at the driver level (which I think is an inappropriate place for it -- the shell is the right place), it should be optional.

majewsky 7 years ago | |

This would be fun as an experiment to see how quickly it fills up the drive, but probably utterly useless in production. A lot of stuff is creating and deleting files all the time, e.g. logrotate.

lixtra 7 years ago | | |

It could be fifo and you would still be able to undo damage for some time.

amelius 7 years ago |

This is another example that shows that Bash (and similar shells) should not be used for scripting.

It's great for the command line, but for scripting there are much better, cleaner, faster and safer alternatives.

floatingatoll 7 years ago | |

What? No, come on. You can’t extrapolate “someone didn’t read the manual” to “don’t use shell scripting”.

avar 7 years ago | |

There's plenty of good reasons not to use shellscript, but someone not knowing the difference between "$@" and $* isn't one of them. This is prominently documented in Bash's documentation: https://www.gnu.org/software/bash/manual/html_node/Special-P...

ashelmire 7 years ago | | |

Nothing about that is especially prominent (its just regular documentation), and then you still need to consider how any given utility will interact with one word vs multiple words.

thjan 7 years ago | |

Please elaborate :)

mruts 7 years ago | |

Like what? Sh? Zsh?