puppe / trash-d

A near drop-in replacement for rm that uses the trash bin

trash-d

A near drop-in replacement for rm that uses the Freedesktop trash bin. Written in the D programming language.

ONLY LINUX AND BSD ARE SUPPORTED! Windows won't work at all, and MacOS probably won't either. There are no plans for support of either platform. Any POSIX and Freedesktop compliant system should work fine.

You can install a pre-built version (x86_64-linux-gnu) from the GitHub releases page

I gave a brief informal talk about this project and D at DoomConf 2021 you can see the slides here

rm compatibility

One of trash-d's primary goals is near compatibility with the standard rm tool.The keyword here is "near". The goal is not exact flag-for-flag compatibility with rm, but you should be able to alias rm=trash and not notice the difference.

Because of this, trash-d will silently ignore unknown options.

Building

trash-d can be built using any D compiler, but it uses Dub and DMD by default. You may need to adapt the build scripts, but the code should be completely portable.

You can build it with Dub using dub build and run tests with dub test.

CMake build files can be generated using dub generate cmake.

Installing

Simply drop the trash binary somewhere on your $PATH such as $HOME/.local/bin.

Optionally set alias rm=trash in your shell config to replace usages of rm with trash-d.

Usage

Using trash-d is the same as most other command line utilities, and intentionally very similar to rm.

trash [OPTIONS...] [FILES...]

Options & Flags

The options and flags are intended to mirror rm's closely, with some additional long options for the trash-d specific features.

• -d, --dir Remove empty directories.
• -r, --recursive Delete directories and their contents.
• -v, --verbose Print more information.
• -i, --interactive Ask before each deletion.
• -f, --force Don't prompt and ignore errors.
• --version Output the version and exit.
• --empty Empty the trash bin.
• --delete FILE Delete a file from the trash.
• --list List out the files in the trash.
• --restore FILE Restore a file from the trash.
• --rm Escape hatch to permanently delete a file.
• -h, --help This help information.

Option Precedence

The --help, --version, --list, --restore, --delete, and --empty flags all cause the program to short-circuit and perform only that operation and no others. Their precedence is in that order exactly, and is intended to cause the least destruction.

Therefore the command trash --empty --list will list the trash bin and NOT empty it.

NOTE: Before version 11 trash-d followed a slightly incorrect precedence order.

Contributing

Contributions welcome! Please come help me clean up my D code, and otherwise make trash-d more useful!

In particular help with packaging trash-d for various distros and operating systems would be greatly appreciated!

However keep in mind that this is a simple tool with a simple job, so it's never going to do that much.

Version Numbers

Versions of trash-d are numbered sequentially with a bump every time I change some functionality. Consider every change to be a breaking change, and be happily surprised when it's not!

Version names are changed whenever something major has changed. Don't treat these like actual version indicators, they're just something fun.

License

trash-d is licensed under the terms of the MIT License. You are free to use it for any purpose under the terms of that license.