alternative to `rm` command

[ultimatelinux]

i've seen many users deleting files and reporting how to recover them.
instead of recovering i've thought of redirecting the files deleted to trash.so,that it might be helpful to recover them.
here's how i do it.

1.take a variable,for example:TRASHPATH.
2.assign the exact path of trash to that variable.
most likely,trash path will be /home/username/.Trash.
3.here's the code just paste this into your .bashrc file.

##################code starts here
TRASHPATH=/home/username/.Trash(or)/home/username/.local/share/Trash
function rem()
{
for i in $*
do
mv $i $TRASHPATH/$i
done
}
##################code ends here


now,if you want to delete files just issue the command
rem file1
you can give multiple files also
rem file1 file2 file3 file4 file5 etc.

p.s:instead of trash,you can direct to another folder also
don't include a slash(/) at the end of path in TRASHPATH variable

for most of the disto's path of trash is ~/.Trash.
in some distro's it is /home/username/.local/share/Trash
hope you all like this.
waiting for your feedback.

[nmset]

You can also alias your script so that the rm command remains usable safely :

alias rm='rem'

It is certainly a good practice for 98% of users. Secured files should be shredded some other way however.

[Cabhan]

Well, for securely deleting files, there is the aptly-named "shred" command .

As for the above trashing script, it makes a common mistake that people make in Bash scripting, which is that it doesn't handle spaces. To test this, I modified the function so that it would simply print the name of the file that it would delete instead of actually moving it to the trash:

bricka@eagle ~/test/bash $ rem foo
foo
bricka@eagle ~/test/bash $ rem "foo bar"
foo
bar

We see that instead of printing "foo bar" as a single file, it gets treated as two files called "foo" and "bar". This is because of how $* is handled in the for loop. The more correct way to do this would have been to use $@, and quote it:

 function rem()
{
    for i in "$@"
    do
        mv $i $TRASHPATH/$i
    done
}

Note that I've changed your $* to "$@" (note the quotes). $@ and $* behave basically the same, except that when quoted, $@ expands to separate words, as opposed to $*, which expands to a single word when quoted. Now the function behaves correctly:

bricka@eagle ~/test/bash $ rem foo
foo
bricka@eagle ~/test/bash $ rem "foo bar"
foo bar