Emulating rm command

[Actionboy]

Can anyone give me some code for writing a safe version of rm that will move stuff to a specified directory?

The first bit is easy I know but sorting out the options and checking whether the files/directories exists is causing me problems. Help! This is quite urgent. I'm at a unix seminar & trying to get a job! Thanks.

 

[Salem]

Since you ultimately have to cope with the problem of deleting the same file twice, then I would do this

- create a subdirectory with the name yyyymmddhhmmss, which is the date-time string at the moment the command is invoked.
- move each file to be deleted into a subdir of the above, which contains the full path of the original file.

So if you want to delete
/path/to/my/file.txt

You would move it to
safe/yyyymmddhhmmss/path/to/my/file.txt

That way, it won't conflict with trying to delete another file.txt in another directory, and trying to delete path/to/my/file.txt sometime later will be ok, since you'll have a different yyyymmddhhmmss

With that, you can always tell when you deleted something, and where it was originally.

 

[Actionboy]

Thanks for replying, but what is confusing me is how to handle it if someone used options with the command, like saferm -iv or something, what kind of loop contruct would I have to use to check for each option? Also, how do I check to see if the file actually exists?

 

[jad]

well file exists can be done with :

if [ -L $filename ] ; then
    echo file is a symbolic link
elif [ -d $filename ] ; then
    echo file is a directory
elif [ -f $filename ] ; then
    echo file is a regular file
fi

for handling parameters : 'more `which filep`' will give an example of parameters, not quite as clever as you want, but i'm sure you can work on it.

 

[jad]

btw for safeties sake, to keep permissions on the files when rm'ing them use something like the tar command before deleting

tar cvf ~/saferm/`date +"%Y%m%d%H%M%S"`.saferm $filename

if you have gtar installed, you could do a zcvf on the file to save space.

 

[jad]

and just if you're interested, in the general unix discussion there was a thread thread80-492846 that did a recycle-bin type thing

 

[Actionboy]

Cheers!