t

Simple CLI tool for removing files safely. Wraps trash-cli.

I make mistakes, but I don't want one of those mistakes to be accidentally permanently deleting an important file. Inspired by safe-rm, I originally wrote this as a more interactive alternative to rm that keeps files for a while before permanent deletion and provides more interactive prompts.

Then I discovered the XDG trash spec and the CLI implementation trash-cli. Allowing trash-cli to do the heavy lifting, I converted this project to a simple wrapper around trash-cli's trash-put command. I wrote a bit about different "safer rm" options here.

The goal of t is to ensure you don't make mistakes deleting files. To that end, it adds the following on top of trash-cli's trash-put:

• incorporates directory exclusion list like safe-rm to avoid deleting important system directories;
• prompts user for confirmation before removing multiple items;
• does require -r for directories;
• only deletes multiple files if no error occurs with any one of them.

Install

It is recommended to install using pipx:

1. Clone this repository.
2. From the repository root, run pipx install ..

Usage

usage: t [-r] <files>...

options:
  -r  Recursively remove directories.

Automatically empty trash

Install trash-cli, then use the trash-empty script in a cronjob. Run crontab -e and add something like

@daily /path/to/trash-cli/trash-empty 30

which removes items in the trash older than 30 days everyday. Alternatively, you may want to use something like

0 * * * * /path/to/trash-cli/trash-empty 30

to empty the trash every hour. The @daily directive is run by anacron under the root user by default, which does not empty the user's trash properly.

License

MIT - see the LICENSE file.