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Review my idea: Preventing accidental usage /bin/rm

1 points by jabo ↗ HN
The problem of accidentally deleting files using rm seems to common, dangerous and painful. Like here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2661209.

I'm thinking of writing a 'replacement' utility of sorts for /bin/rm. I'll rename the existing rm command to say rmx or something and use my version of /bin/rm instead. When you type rm at the prompt, my replacement utility will actually move the files to a "Trash Can" in the file system, instead of deleting it it. And when you type, say 'rm --rm' it will by pass the Trash can and delete the file. And something like 'rm --restore [filename]' will restore the file to its original location.

This way accidental deletions are prevented. Does a utility like this exist already, so that I don't re-invent the wheel?

4 comments

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[dead] lv_
Not a bad idea. Surprised this hasn't been implements in cPanel's jailshell to be 'customer-proof'
tmhedberg
There is libtrash (http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~marriaga/software/libtrash/), which does something very similar. It adds a library to your LD_PRELOAD variable which intercepts unlink syscalls and moves deleted files to $HOME/Trash instead of actually deleting them. The nice thing about this is that it works transparently, and not just for /bin/rm, but for anything that deletes files.

That's not to say it couldn't be improved upon, though.

fagatini
Or you could just be responsible with your rm commands.

Also keep good backups. As soon as I read the article it reminded me to plug in my 2tb drive and run timemachine.

fexl
I do this sort of thing a lot, not as a formalized utility but as a practice. For example I'll often do something like this:

  mv data ~/tmp/
  cd ~/tmp/
  rm -rf data
At least when I'm in the tmp directory I can see that clearly on the command line so I'm more comfortable issuing dangerous commands.

I suppose there might be room for a formal utility, but sometimes you just have to be careful. Take for example my "build" script for Fexl (at https://github.com/chkoreff/Fexl/blob/master/src/build). There you will see these lines:

  # I don't use $obj and $bin here because that would be dangerous if I made
  # a mistake setting them above.
  rm -rf ../obj
  rm -rf ../bin
If I were not being so careful, I could simply say:

  rm -rf $obj
  rm -rf $bin
Because after, all, the $obj and $bin variables are "guaranteed" to point to safely disposable directories. Heh. Famous last words. Redundancy is key to reliability.