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Undoable RM Command for UNIX

1. Introduction
2. Download
3. Usage & Installation

UNIX is a very powerful environment, but it lacked of something fundamental, undo-able 'rm' (remove) of files. Ok, every prof. system-admin makes daily backups within a business environment, and most files should be recoverable.

But wouldn't it be more handy to just undo the last few rm's you did instead looking up on which backup your files can be found (in case of incremental backups)?

All graphical oriented desktop-environments have it, the trash-can, why not having the same on UNIX too, here it is.

So far Christophe Blaess <ccb@club-internet.fr> wrote this small but extremely useful package, we host here this source-code.

UndoRM 2. Download

undo_rm.tar.gz ($MyVersion: 0.001 - Tue Aug 24 15:20:10 EDT 1999 - kiwi$)

UndoRM 3. Usage & Installation

(Originally written by Christophe Blaess <ccb@club-internet.fr>)

This is a shell script for Bash, called 'rm_secure'. I use it as frontal for the rm command. It stores the deleted files in an archive in the user's directory. A command-line option allows the user to view the content of this archive, and another option permits the restoration of the deleted files.

For example :

$ ls -l

$ ls -l

$ rm --viewtrash

-rw-r--r--  1 ccb   users    22 May 26 10:35 1996 important_file

-rw-r--r--  1 ccb   users    23 May 26 10:35 1996 not_important

$ rm --restore important_file

$ ls -l

-rw-r--r--  1 ccb   users    22 May 26 10:35 important_file

$ rm --viewtrash

-rw-r--r--  1 ccb   users    23 May 26 10:35 1996 not_important

$ rm --emptytrash

$ rm --viewtrash

Okay, it slows down a few the rm command. But it may also save hours of work lost due to a keystroke error...

There is the script 'rm_secure', place it in /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin then insert a line:

alias rm='/usr/local/bin/rm_secure'

in /etc/profile, so this script will be called by Bash in the place of the true rm command.

You can use the '--nosecure' or '-n' option to delete a file without archiving it. This is useful when you decide to erase huge amount of files in recursive directories (for example a package you have tested but find uninteresting).

I use a cron job to deleted the archived files every day (running as root job).

00 04 * * *    /usr/local/bin/empty_trash

There is the 'empty_trash' script, maybe you can prefer something like :

trap '/bin/rm ~/.rm_saved.tar.gz EXIT

in /etc/profile, which erase the archive each time the user exits the shell. (I've not fully tested this)

Obviously this tips doesn't secure the deletion of files or directories by a file-manager, but I find it quite usefull, especially when doing administrative jobs as root ('rm tmp/ *' in place of 'rm tmp/*' ...)

                                                                                                                                   

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