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 thatrm <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.
