A bit of Linux – An alternative to rm command

I remember once during an assignment submission, a friend of mine issued one of the most sorry commands on the linux shell where he had placed his programs, the command was rm *.:P. Well, understandably he was trying to issue a command like rm *.txt but in a hurry he made this blunder mistake. He had to go through a lot of trouble after that. When I came to know about it, I felt that it was really a blunder and could happen to anyone. With the load of programming assignments increasing such a stupid error could result in a lot of waste. So, I decided to address this problem and came up with a very short and sweet solution for it. I didn’t bother to look up over the internet for existing solutions because mine was fine for me . Today I just ran through that script and wished to share it here.

The first step is to create a Dustbin directory i.e. a place where you want your files, which are removed by rm command should be moved. Preferably create it in your home directory as a hidden directory eg. mkdir /home/avi/.dustbin .
Second, create a bash script and place the following code in it.

#!/bin/bash
for i in $*
do
        if [ ${i:0:1} != "-" ]; then # NOT an arguement to rm eg. -rf 
                `mv $i /home/avi/.dustbin`
        fi
done

Name this file as rm and place in any directory which you wouldn’t delete eg. ~/Documents and make this file an executable by issuing chmod +x rm

Next step is to edit the .bashrc file in your home directory. If there is a line which goes export PATH then before this line or else before the aliases write the following lines
PATH=/home/avi/Documents:$PATH
export $PATH
Do replace the avi with your home directory’s name

Now your solution is ready. Whenever you’ll issue the command rm file.txt or rm * the files will be just moved to this Dustbin. It is like the recycle bin of windows but for the terminal. So, all the files/directories that you remove with the rm command will be moved here.

Now the hitch comes on how to delete these files permanently from .dustbin?? To do so you will have to issue command like /bin/rm -rf .dustbin. This will delete the entire dustbin. You can figure out now how you can customize it. I was looking for a way to provide a notification via a pop-up to the user when the dustbin grows very large. I found the zenity command for it and tried to place it in .bash_logout but things didn’t work out. I hope some of you people can help me find a good way to notify the user of cleaning up the dustbin.

Well, this might not be the best solution but being a newbie in linux, I enjoyed my little work.