rm-safe

rm-safe ✔️

Why 'adjust' rm?

👉 The rm command is a footgun.

If you're like me, you've shot yourself in the foot too many times using the standard rm shell command. This CLI module is a simple attempt at adding a layer of safety around rm, while still fulfilling its intended purpose.

rm has no built in safety. The files you target get unlinked, the metadata is removed, and it's just gone. In other words: if you delete something, its permanently deleted. If you're confident you'll use it correctly all the time, then more power to you, I only hope this module might ease your conscience more if you're not.

What's different?

safe-rm has two opinions:

1️⃣ A backup of the files you delete should be temporarily stored in a common /temp directory, so that you can recover something if you did not intend to delete it.

2️⃣ A last-ditch confirmation dialogue should happen whenever you use the -r, -rf, or -Rf flags. This way

Installation

• Run $npm install -g rm-safe

• If you don't have one already, add a new local ~/temp directory to ensure the system always knows where to eventually delete your backup files. safe-rm will add one for you when you first run it if it doesn't exist, but you'll still need to add this line to your local shell configuration file (eg. ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bashrc, etc): export TMPDIR=~/temp

• Add an alias for the rm command in your shell configuration file: alias rm="rm-safe" (Note: this will only work if rm-safe has been installed globally).

Use

• If you added the alias, you can now use rm-safe just like you're used to with rm.
• If you'd rather not add an alias, you can just run $rm-safe command from your terminal.
• rm-safe also supports the use of standard wildcards (eg. rm my-directory/*, rm *.txt, *example*, etc).

License: ISC