Move to Trash from the Mac Command Line

I was about to make a lengthy comment to a post on Life Hacker and decided to put most of it here instead. That site is seriously starting to take over my life.

A while back I wrote this shell function to be able to move files to the trash from the command line on my Mac, rather than condemning them to oblivion with no chance of return. This is in my .profile.

It's a little hairy looking but it does the job. Note that it attempts to append names with a date stamp if a file/directory with that name already exists in the trash, just as the Finder does.

function del() {
  while [ -n "$1" ]; do
    if [ ! -e "$1" ]; then
      echo "'$1' not found; exiting"
      return
    fi  

    local file=`basename -- "$1"`

    # Chop trailing '/' if there
    file=${file%/}

    local destination=''

    if [ -e "$HOME/.Trash/$file" ]; then
      # Extract file and extension
      local ext=`expr "$file" : ".*\(\.[^\.]*\)$"`
      local base=${file%$ext}

      # Add a space between base and timestamp
      test -n "$base" && base="$base "

      destination="/$base`date +%H-%M-%S`_$RANDOM$ext"
    fi  

    echo "Moving '$1' to '$HOME/.Trash$destination'"
    \mv -i -- "$1" "$HOME/.Trash$destination" || return
    shift
  done
}

alias rm='del'

An interesting side-effect is that

rm <directory>

works as well, which is a little uncanny because ordinarily either rmdir <directory> (for an empty directory) or rm -rf is required.

2/23/10 update: Handle case where rm options are mistakenly specified.

7/4/08 update: Fixed problem when removing file names containing spaces.