rm-safe

Safe rm that moves files to Trash instead of permanently deleting them. Includes a small rm shim and guidance for macOS, common Linux sudoers setups, and NixOS.

Features

• Moves files/directories to OS trash (XDG trash on Linux, Finder Trash on macOS).
• Refuses to touch protected locations (/, /etc, /nix/store, etc.).
• Works with sudo via a wrapper, not shell aliases.
• Restores manual trash entries with --undo or --undo-picker (gum or fzf).
• Built-in test suite: bin/rm-safe --test.

Files

• bin/rm-safe — main tool.
• bin/rm — wrapper shim that routes rm -> rm-safe, warns/falls back to system rm safely (recursion guard).
• bin/test/rm-safe_test — undo/restore tests.
• bin/test/rm_override_test — shim tests.

Quick start (user-level)

1. Put bin on your PATH (e.g., export PATH="$PWD/bin:$PATH").
2. Optional: remove any alias rm=… so the shim is used directly.
3. Run bin/rm-safe --help and bin/test/rm_override_test.

Platform notes macOS (defaults keep user PATH under sudo)

• Symlink or copy bin/rm into ~/bin (or any user directory already ahead of /bin).
• sudo rm … will hit the shim because PATH is preserved by default.

Linux with sudo secure_path

• Create a root-owned override dir, e.g. /usr/bin/overrides (0755, root:root).
• Install the shim there as rm and ensure rm-safe is reachable (same dir is simplest).
• In sudoers (via visudo), prepend the override dir:

  Defaults secure_path="/usr/bin/overrides:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin"
  

• Avoid adding broad dirs like /usr/local/bin just to get the shim; overrides keeps blast-radius small.

NixOS (declarative)

• Build/install rm-safe and the shim into a root-owned path on PATH, e.g. /run/wrappers/bin.
• Example snippet:

  # configuration.nix
  {
    security.sudo.extraConfig = ''
      Defaults secure_path=/run/wrappers/bin:/usr/bin:/bin
    '';
    environment.systemPackages = [ rm-safe-package ];
    environment.pathsToLink = [ "/run/wrappers/bin" ];
  }
  

• Ensure rm wrapper in that path execs rm-safe; shim already uses command -p rm to reach the real rm when needed.

Cautions

• Log-rotate/cleanup scripts that expect permanent deletion will move files to trash when the shim is first in PATH; they should call /bin/rm explicitly if deletion is intended.
• The shim warns to stderr if rm-safe is missing and falls back to system rm.

Testing

• Shim: bin/test/rm_override_test
• Main tool: bin/rm-safe --test
• Undo/restore: bin/test/rm-safe_test

License

• MIT (see LICENSE)