2RM

"rm with guard rails"

A wrapper for the "rm" command with soft-deletes, config-based deletion, debug information, and saner defaults

"GNU Like" command line arguments

• -i Interactivly prompt before each deletion request
• -I Prompt if deleting more than the interactive threshold of files (default 3)
• -r, -R, --recursive Recursively delete a directory of files
• -v, --verbose Emit additional verbose information
• -d, --dir Only delete empty directories
• --help Display help information (without deletion)
• --version Display version information (without deletion)

Additional command line arguments

• --overwrite Overwrite the disk location location with zeros
• --hard Do not soft-delete file
• --soft Soft delete a file and store a backup (default /tmp/2rm)
• --silent Do not print out additional information priduced by 2rm. This is useful for scripting situations
• --dry-run Perform a dry run and show all the files that would be deleted
• --bypass-protected Using this flag will allow you to delete a file protected by the 2rm config
• --notify Send a system notification once deletion is complete
• --force Bypass protections

Unsupported command line arguments

• --interactive[=WHEN] Interactive with a custom threshold
• --one-file-system Do not allow cross-file-system deletes
• -f, --force Bypass protections

Features

Removes the ability to remove your root directory

I have done this so that you can't accidently add a space and remove your root directory with a typo such as

$ rm -rf ./directory /
>

(yes I know that you have to use --no-preserve-root and I have removed that too)

Delete directories without the -r flag

You no longer have to add the -r flag when deleting a directory

(although you still can if you want to)

Soft-deletes by default

By default, the program will soft delete your files by adding a hard link to the file in the /tmp/2rm directory.

This means that the files underlying INode is not freed, and can be recovered from the /tmp/2rm directory if you deleted the wrong file by mistake.

By using the /tmp directory, the operating system will automatically hard delete files upon restart.

Sometimes you want to hard delete a file/directory every time that you run the rm command e.g. you probably want your node_modules hard deleted every time and never want to soft delete them. In this case, you can modify your ~/.local/share/2rm/config.yml file to always hard delete node_modules.

Overwriting disk location with zeros

When deleting a file with the linux inbuilt rm command, the file is still avaliable on disk.

Meaning that the file can still be recovered by any sufficiantly technical user.

This can be problematic when dealing with sensitive files such as private keys that if leaked could lead to catastrophic consequences.

You can overwrite a files disk location (rendering it unrecoverable) by using the --overwrite flag.

2rm will still soft-delete the file by default, but the soft-deleted file will be completely filled with zeros.

I made the decision that overwritten files will still be soft deleted because it might be useful for timestamp logging/auditing purposes. E.g. "when did I overwrite xyz"

If you want to fully delete a file from disk and the file system use both the --overwrite and --hard flags.

Config-based deletion

You can specify what directories are soft-deleted anb hard-deleted by using the ~/.local/share/2rm/config.yml file.

# ~/.local/share/2rm/config.yml

# defaults to /tmp/2rm/ if not specified
# in the config file
# any files that are soft deleted will be
# backed up in the `backups` directory
backups: /tmp/2rm/
# whenever files matching these paths are deleted
# the disk location will be overwritten with zeros
overwrite:
    # when deleting ssh keys, we always want to 
    # overwrite them with zeros to protect
    # against attackers recovering the production
    # ssh keys
    - ".ssh/*"
hard:
    - "node_modules/"
    - "target/"
    - ".angular/"
    - ".next/"
# always soft delete backup files, 
# regardless of it they are configured
# for a hard delete
soft:
    - "*.bak"
# do not allow deleting these files/directories
# without using the `--bypass-protected` flag this
# does not make the file protected at the system level
# through other tools, but it does protect against
# accidental deletion through 2rm
protected:
    - ".ssh/"
# when using the -I flag without any arguments, the user will be prompted
# for confirmation before deleting each file if the number of files is
# greater or equal to this threshold
# default is 3 files/directories
interactive: 10