_______  _______  _______  _______         ______    __   __
|       ||   _   ||       ||       |       |    _ |  |  |_|  |
|  _____||  |_|  ||    ___||    ___| ____  |   | ||  |       |
| |_____ |       ||   |___ |   |___ |____| |   |_||_ |       |
|_____  ||       ||    ___||    ___|       |    __  ||       |
 _____| ||   _   ||   |    |   |___        |   |  | || ||_|| |
|_______||__| |__||___|    |_______|       |___|  |_||_|   |_|

A much safer replacement of bash rm with ALMOST FULL features of the origin rm command.

Initially developed on Mac OS X, then tested on Linux.

Using safe-rm, the files or directories you choose to remove will move to $HOME/.Trash instead of simply deleting them. You could put them back whenever you want manually.

If a file or directory with the same name already exists in the Trash, the name of newly-deleted items will be ended with the current date and time.

• On MacOS, safe-rm` will use AppleScript to delete files or directories as much as possible to enable the built-in "put-back" capability in the system Trash bin.
• Custom configurations.

For those implemented options, safe-rm will act exactly the same as the original rm command

-i, --interactive

-I, --interactive=once

-f, --force

-r, -R, --recursive, --Recursive

-v, --verbose

--

Combined short options are also supported, such as

-rf, -riv, -rfv, etc

Add an alias to your ~/.bashrc script,

alias rm='/path/to/bin/rm.sh'

and /path/to is where you git clone shell-safe-rm in your local machine.

If you have NPM (node) installed (RECOMMENDED):

npm i -g safe-rm

Or normally with make (not recommended, may be unstable):

make && sudo make install
# and enjoy

For those who have no make command:

sudo sh install.sh

Installing safe-rm will put safe-rm in your /bin directory. In order to use safe-rm, you need to add an alias to your ~/.bashrc script and in all yours currently open terminals, like this:

alias rm='safe-rm'

After installation and alias definition, when you execute rm command in the Terminal, lines of below will be printed:

$ rm
safe-rm
usage: rm [-f | -i] [-dPRrvW] file ...
     unlink file

which helps to tell safe-rm from the original rm.

First remove the alias rm=... line from your ~/.bashrc file, then

npm uninstall -g safe-rm

Or

make && sudo make uninstall

Or

sudo sh uninstall.sh

Since 2.0.0, you could create a configuration file named .safe-rm.conf in your HOME directory, to support

• defining your custom trash directory
• allowing safe-rm to permanently delete files and directories that are already in the trash
• disallowing safe-rm to use AppleScript

For the description of each config, you could refer to the sample file here

If you want to use a custom configuration file

alias="SAFE_RM_CONF=/path/to/safe-rm.conf /path/to/bin/rm.sh"

Or if it is installed by npm:

alias="SAFE_RM_CONF=/path/to/safe-rm.conf safe-rm"