rm-teng

An attempt to minimise the impact of rm in careless hands. Note, minimise, not prevent.

Motivation

A couple of times I've managed to rm -rf {{ some-dir }} accidentally and, each time, it's been verrry annoying. Having something which stored {{ some-dir }} in a different location would have enabled me to undo the error. Issue here is rm -i wouldn't have saved me, I've deleted things thinking they were safe to delete then found out they weren't.

Usage

Basic

Expected usage is as follows:

# in .zshrc / .bashrc / .whatever
alias rm="uvx rm-teng"

The only case that's currently handled is rm -rf {{ some-dir }}.

Configuration

Configuration is done via the following env vars:

• RM_TENG_DELETION_DIR: Optional, controls where to store files that are relocated by rm-teng. If set it must be an absolute path. Default is ~/.rm_rf_files.
• RM_TENG_DOUBLE_CHECK: Optional, controls whether to prompt for confirmation when running rm commands that don't have any handlers set. Default is false.

What it doesn't do

If used in the way outlined above rm-teng is only called when called interactively from the shell. It won't be called from scripts, and it won't be called from something like find . -type f | xargs rm (see https://zsh.sourceforge.io/Doc/Release/Shell-Grammar.html#Aliasing or similar if unfamiliar).

Cleaning up

When rm -rf {{ some-dir }} is run the directory is moved to ~/.rm_rf_files instead of being deleted. As a result a few entries can build up here.

rm-teng doesn't currently handle cleaning these up. It's pretty easy to do something along the lines of:

# Simple workflow to check what is in the {{ deleted-dir }} older than a certain
# time, and delete.

# check what's there
find . -mindepth 1 -type d -ctime +10 | less
# delete (if ok)
find . -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type d -ctime +10 -print0 | xargs -0 rm -rf

Hopefully a bit more mindfulness can be applied at this stage!

Restore deleted

Alternatively, you should be able to restore something by simply moving it back where it was.

E.g: if we have ~/one/two/three/four/five, then run rm -rf one it'll create:

{{ timestamp }}
└── Users
  └── user_name
    └── one
      └── two
        └── three
          └── four
            └── five

Then from ~/ you can run mv {{ rm-teng-dir }}/{{ timestamp }}/Users/user_name/one ./ to restore.

Alternative solutions

I've managed to find more of these after writing most of this, you might find one more suitable! rip2 and rm-protection (who I copied most of this list off) look nice, though I've not really used either:

• https://github.com/Byron/trash-rs
• https://github.com/MilesCranmer/rip2
• https://github.com/alanzchen/rm-protection
• https://github.com/andreafrancia/trash-cli
• https://github.com/hitzhangjie/rm
• https://github.com/kaelzhang/shell-safe-rm (bash)

Future development

I've had this running for a bit and have found it fine. Adding additional handlers should be pretty straightforward, it would also be easy to implement custom handlers for user specific settings.