dumb question, how hard would it be to implement?
when most files are deleted, they aren’t removed from memory, just their indexes are.
how about rm just marks the index as discartable in case a new file needs space it can be saved there, but until then, rm can be reversed?
i think the better way would be to replace rm with something that just moves files to a trash bin like how graphical file managers do it.
if you were just pulling the data back off the disk, and you didnt notice it IMMEDIATELY or a background process is writing some data, it could still be corrupted.
there was something like that i had on win3.2 called like undel.exe or something, but same deal, often it was courupted somehow by the time i was recovering the data
I usually don’t think about it at all, but every now and then I’m struck by how terrifyingly destructive rm -f can be.
I’ll use it to delete some build files or whatever, then I’ll suddenly have a streak of paranoia and need to triple check that I’m actually deleting the right thing. It would be nice to have a “safe” option that made recovery trivial, then I could just toggle “safe” to be on by default.
Honestly, after re-reading my own comment, I’m considering just putting some stupid-simple wrapper around mv that moves files to a dedicated trash bin. I’ll just delete the trash bin every now and then…
-Proceeds to collect 300 GB of build files and scrapped virtual environments over the coming month-
There are solutions already. Just use them instead of rm
This breaks the advice to never alias a standard command to do something radically different from its regular function.
Sure, go ahead and alias ls to have extra options like --color, but don't alias rm to do nothing, or even rm -i (-i is interactive and prompts for each file).
Why? Because one day you'll be logged into a different system that doesn't have your cushioning alias and whoops, bye-bye files.
Now that you think about it, you thought that ls output looked weird, but that didn't actually break anything.
As you suggest, yes, look into your OS's trash option, but leave rm alone.
GNOME-derived systems can use gio trash fileglob (or gvfs-trash on older systems) to put things in the actual desktop trash receptacle.
KDE's syntax sucks, but it's kioclientX move fileglob trash:/ where X may or may not be present and is a version number of some kind.
You could set up a shell function or script that fixes that syntax and give it any name you like - as long as it doesn't collide with a standard one. On that rare foreign system it won't exist and everything will be fine.
You alias rm to do nothing. There is no danger of aliasing rm to echo. The only thing that’ll happen is nothing.
Or are you seriously suggesting that if you do this, you somehow get used to rm doing nothing? Like you’ll just start rm’ing randomly because you know it’ll echo? I mean, stupider things have happened, but… yeah
Alejandro Mendoza
🍉 Albert 🍉
dadarobot
Azzurm could be aliased to do, it is one of the safer ones. It's still bad practice in my book.
rm, but rather to make a function like rmv <file> that would move the file to a trash directory.
My “trick” with this is to mv files I’m very sure I want to be “deleting” into /tmp . If I’m sure I don’t need it, it gets purged on reboot.
This is usually A-okay for my home server since it reboots so rarely! A desktop machine might give you a little less time to reconsider. But it at least solved the “trash is using 45% of my hard disk now” issue haha.
In the very worst case scenario there’s the “Drop everything and run photorec / testdisk” as a last resort!
