this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2025
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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 -rcan 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.
I think one solution is (browseable) Snapshots
Honestly, after re-reading my own comment, I'm considering just putting some stupid-simple wrapper around
mvthat 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
rmhttps://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Trash_management
Then can alias rm to
echo Use trash instead!or something. You wanna build new habits, not co-opt rm, it could happen easily that you're ssh'd into a system where your rm alias doesn't exist or similarMy thought wasn't to alias
rm, but rather to make a function likermv <file>that would move the file to a trash directory.But of course this already exists- thanks for pointing me to the resource:)
This breaks the advice to never alias a standard command to do something radically different from its regular function.
Sure, go ahead and alias
lsto have extra options like--color, but don't aliasrmto do nothing, or evenrm -i(-iis 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
lsoutput looked weird, but that didn't actually break anything.As you suggest, yes, look into your OS's trash option, but leave
rmalone.GNOME-derived systems can use
gio trash fileglob(orgvfs-trashon older systems) to put things in the actual desktop trash receptacle.KDE's syntax sucks, but it's
kioclientX move fileglob trash:/whereXmay 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
rmto 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
rmdoing nothing? Like you'll just start rm'ing randomly because you know it'll echo? I mean, stupider things have happened, but... yeahI admit that of the things
rmcould be aliased to do, it is one of the safer ones. It's still bad practice in my book.My "trick" with this is to mv files I'm very sure I want to be "deleting" into
/tmp. If it instantly turns out to be a mistake, I can pull it back. Else, 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!