Get trashy! A mostly Freedesktop-compliant rubbish bin interface for the shell, written entirely in Bash.
If you're looking at trashy right now, you've probably just accidentally rm'd a superImportantFile by accident.
You're cursing God, UNIX, GNU, computers, and yourself.
There's little hope for your already deleted file, with trashy, you'll never have to go through that ever again!
Trashy is a simple shell script that enables you to restore superImportantFile simply and painlessly. Just type:
trash --restore foo
and 'foo' is put back where it belongs.
Trashy also serves as a trashcan for the command line. Issue this command:
trash foo bar
and trashy moves the files 'foo' and 'bar' to your system trash. Or type:
trash foo\ bar
to move the file 'foo bar' to your system trash.
When you're really, really sure that you want to nuke everything in your trash out of existence, issue the command:
trash --empty
and trashy empties your system trash.
The rm command doesn't account for human error.
Even if you like your UNIX to be responsive and obedient, you'll still make mistakes.
Trashy offers a buffer between you and deleted-file disasters.
Trashy is Bashy, meaning that it's very portable; anything that can run BASH can run it.
You can easily install it on GNU Linux, freeBSD, and netBSD.
It's also been tested on Solaris and Open Solaris families, and even macOS (obviously not Freedesktop-compliant, so features are missing).
Projects similar to trashy do exist.
One, trash-cli, uses Python and offers some really neat and fancy features.
Check it out if you're on a Linux box, or if you don't mind a bit of set-up on non-Free Desktop UNIX systems.
Trashy defines a system trash on Linux, BSD, and Solaris-based operating systems in accordance to the Open Desktop standard:
~/.local/share/Trash
Because trashy uses the Open Desktop standard, you can use it alongside the usual desktop Trash.
Files you add to your trash with trashy go to the same place as files you drag-and-drop to the Trash on your desktop.
On systems that do not not to follow the Open Desktop standard or that do not use a graphical desktop, trashy tries to conform with what is available.
If all else fails, it uses $HOME/.Trash.
Many of us had rm beat into our heads early on, so getting out of the habit of using it is actually really hard.
If you find yourself using rm in spite of trashy, you can alias rm='trashy' in your .bashrc file.
This works quite well. And if you ever want to override your alias, just use:
\rm foo
or
/bin/rm foo
Simple as that.
Until you get used to typing trash instead of rm when you want to delete a file, the alias helps.
Once you've gotten used to using rm to permanently delete something, and using trashy to move to a trash bin, delete the alias from your .bashrc file.
Bugs are sure to emerge under the right testing circumstances. Give it a go and if you find one, please report it. I can't promise I'll fix bugs immediately, but they'll definitely make my list. Otherwise, feel free to fix a bug and send me a patch, or a merge request on Gitlab.
The top-priority plan is to provide better handling of files not in one's home folder — that is, do not copy file to local file system to "trash" it, but use a hidden .trash dir on the remote file system (or at least provide this option).
You can email klaatu at the domain of member dot fsf dot org.