rmsafe (remove_safely)

Introduction

After (almost) accidentally removing a file with about week's worth of changes for my C lang assignment, I took it as an excuse to lear a bit more of Rust and re-write the rm command.

Basics

Instead of just rm(ing) files and folders, they instead are moved to the local trash or custom path location.

Installation

cargo install rmsafe

Usage

NOTE: I have only tested this on Linux Mint 20.3.

// view trashcan path
rmsafe 

// removing a single file
rmsafe test.txt

// removing a single folder; it will recursively move the folder to trash
rmsafe test_dir

// removing files with wildcard matching; removing all files ending with .o
rmsafe -r "*.o"  

// change trashcan path
rmsafe -t "/home/jane/Desktop/.rmsafe"

Change your .bashrc to include the following

alias rm='printf "Avoid using rm!"'
alias rms="rmsafe"

This disallows the use of rm, you can still use sudo rm and not setting rmsafe to rm ensures that you don't accidentally rm while on someone else's computer

Contribution