safe-rm
safe-rm is intended to prevent the accidental deletion of important files by replacing /bin/rm with a wrapper that checks the given arguments against a configurable blacklist of files and directories that should never be removed. Users who attempt to delete one of these protected files or directories will not be able to do so and will be shown a warning message instead. Protected paths can be set both at the site and user levels.
| Tags | Utilities safety delete protection delete prevention RM |
|---|---|
| Licenses | GPLv3 |
| Operating Systems | POSIX Linux |
| Implementation | Perl |
| Translations | English |
Recent releases
- 22 May 2009 18:13
Changes: This release fixes a bug that caused symbolic links to protected files to be undeletable. Therefore, if you create a symlink to /usr/lib, you will now be able to delete it without having to use the real rm explicitly. Another minor enhancement included in this release is the change in the message displayed by safe-rm when a protected file is skipped. The new message should now make it explicit who is to blame when a file isn't being deleted.
- 02 Apr 2009 11:10
Changes: In addition to protecting specific files and directories from accidental deletion, this release introduces support for wildcards in protected paths. Minor improvements were also made to the documentation and overall code quality.
- 31 Oct 2008 23:36
Changes: The main change in this release is a fix for a bug that was preventing the root directory from being added to the list of protected paths. Safe-rm is now able to protect you from the infamous "rm -rf /".
- 09 Sep 2008 07:32
Changes: This release fixes a bug which caused safe-rm to skip the full blacklist checks when dealing with certain files and directories in the working directory. Previously, unless the argument you passed to safe-rm contained a slash, it would not get the real (absolute) path of the file before checking against the blacklist.
- 20 Jun 2008 15:13
No changes have been submitted for this release.
