A more desirable rm

Update: Added mv option -t and --backup=t (thanks to Matt) to prevent file collisions from same-named files. Thanks Matt! A bashrc version and a bash script are both available.

Warning: Currently I am not using this script. This script works good for most instances but I discovered it does have problems when compiling. During compiling some files get force removed (the rm -f, -fr, or -rf options) that it looks like mv will not do. When this happens files don’t get removed and compiling errors can occur. I am still trying to figure out how to do this.

I’ve deleted files before that I wish I could have back and resorted to file saving utilities to try and save them but I have never done this before:

rm -rf ~/ .Arachnophilia

I was doing a bit of spring (fall?) cleaning and as you may have guessed: the space between ~/ and .Arachnophilia was not intended. An accidental slip of the thumb caused this and yes, this had caused my computer to delete my whole home directory! I remembered a post I had read and quickly I did sudo init 1 to drop into single user mode. The post was for recovering a text file though and single user mode didn’t accept any input anyhow so I rebooted into my beloved install disk.

R! and R? (Request!! and Recover?)

Luckily I had back up several days ago. I wrote down the files I had been working on since then to try and recover. The Arch Wiki has a good page on this. I tried extundelete first and while its probably the best and most through way to recover all files, it recovers the files like this:

ls . | head -n 2
010392
010394

Since the files I’ve been working on were just text files and scripts, Photorec was a better application for this. Photorec is able to analyze and determine certain file types including text files and script files.

Afterward, I was left with directories and files that looked like recup_dir/f1029394.txt. 14000 and some text files if I remember right. To be able to find which one were the correct ones using grep is awesome. So quick too. I just had to be able to remember some text within the file and search for it like this:

grep -rn --include=*.txt "the text here" .

Using grep alone instead of combined it with some program like find is much quicker. The -r does a recursive search, the -n will print the line number, and --include specifies the file type in this case. Piping grep works good for more refined searches like searching for two patterns on a string or removing a string:

grep -rn --include=*.txt "the text here" . | grep -n "this too"
grep -rn --include=*.txt "the text here" . | grep -v "string not with this"

I found the files I needed, thankfully, and was able to get them back.

~/Never\ Again\?/

First thing I did after restoring from my backup was to see if I could prevent this again. The answer was pretty simple: move the files to the trash instead. By adding:

alias rm="mv -t ~/.local/share/Trash/files --backup=t --verbose"

to the ~/.bashrc files will get moved to the trash instead of deleted. The ~/.local/share/Trash/file is defined by the freedesktop.org organization so it has interoperability with and Gnome and other desktops. With the -t and --backup=t options mv will rename files with duplicate file names to ones with appended numbers (e.g. abc.~2~).

Here’s is a more detailed version in a bash script that includes feedback:

	#!/bin/bash
	# rm replacement for regular user. Moves files to trash rather than
	# directly deleting them.
	reg_rm=/bin/rm
	# Display usage if no parameters given
	if [[ -z "$@" ]]; then
	echo " ${0##*/} <file, folder, link...> - rm replacement: move to trash rather than delete"
	exit
	fi
	# Text color variables
	txtund=$(tput sgr 0 1) # Underline
	txtbld=$(tput bold) # Bold
	bldred=${txtbld}$(tput setaf 1) # red
	bldblu=${txtbld}$(tput setaf 4) # blue
	bldwht=${txtbld}$(tput setaf 7) # white
	txtrst=$(tput sgr0) # Reset
	info=${bldwht}*${txtrst} # Feedback
	pass=${bldblu}*${txtrst}
	warn=${bldred}*${txtrst}
	ques=${bldblu}?${txtrst}
	# Run 'rm' regular if root.
	if [[ $(whoami) == root ]]; then
	$reg_rm "$@"
	exit
	fi
	# Test if first entry is an option, if it is ignore.
	if [[ "$1" == -* ]]; then
	echo " Ignored: "$bldred""$1""$txtrst""
	shift
	fi
	# Trash each file independently, give feedback.
	for e in "$@"; do
	if [ ! -e "$e" ] && [ ! -L "$e" ]; then
	echo " Unexist: "$bldred""$e""$txtrst""
	continue
	fi
	mv -t ~/.local/share/Trash/files --backup=t "$e"
	echo " Trashed: "$bldblu""$e""$txtrst""
	done

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