trash

A safe alternative to rm & rmdir for macOS (and maybe more)

As many folks know, rm and rmdir can be dangerous because of the fact that they hard-delete files and directories, rather than sending them to the trash bin - trash is my take on a remedy for this "problem", moving files and folders into the trash bin instead.

If you move two files named index.html into the trash, the default macOS behavior is to rename the second file by inserting the 12-hour clock time of the move prior to the extension - so index.html will become index 3:42 PM.html, etc.; a duplicate directory or a file without a type extension will have the time appended to its name - scripts will become scripts 3:42 PM.

I've also included my own twist, for the rare (but possible!) situation where you might want to move multiple items with the same name to the trash from different locations. In those instances, an additional trailing number will be appended to allow for unique identification. For example, running

trash index.html test_1/index.html test_2/index.html test_3/index.html

will result in the following trash content:

index.html
index 3:45 PM.html
index 3:45 PM.html (1)
index 3:45 PM.html (2)

Installation

Install this script from the cloned Github repo:

• Clone the repo

git clone https://github.com/darrenklein/trash

• cd into the clone

cd trash

• Run the installation script

sh ./install.sh

trash will be installed to usr/local/bin/trash.

Make sure usr/local/bin is in your bash $PATH!

Uninstallation

From within a local copy of the trash git repo, you can uninstall the script by running

sh ./uninstall.sh

or you can just delete the file at usr/local/bin/trash directly.

Use

The trash command can be followed by any number of files/directories that you wish to move to the trash bin. For example:

trash index.html src scripts README.md

Big ups

Thanks to Alexander Epstein - https://github.com/alexanderepstein - whose BashSnippets helped to guide the structure of this project.