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safe-rm - https://launchpad.net/safe-rm
prevention of accidental deletions using a directory blacklist

Copyright (C) 2008-2014  Francois Marier <francois@fmarier.org>

   This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
   it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
   the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
   (at your option) any later version.

   This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
   but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
   MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
   GNU General Public License for more details.

   You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
   along with this program.  If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

How to use
-----------

Once you have installed safe-rm on your system (see INSTALL), you will need to
fill the system-wide or user-specific blacklists with the paths that you'd like
to protect against accidental deletion.

The system-wide blacklist lives in /etc/safe-rm.conf and you should probably add
paths like these:

  /
  /etc
  /usr
  /usr/lib
  /var

The user-specific blacklist lives in ~/.config/safe-rm and could include things like:

  /home/username/documents
  /home/username/documents/*
  /home/username/.mozilla


Other approaches
-----------------

If you want more protection than what safe-rm can offer, here are a few suggestions.

You could of couse request confirmation everytime you delete a file by putting this in
your /etc/bash.bashrc:

  alias rm='rm -i'

But this won't protect you from getting used to always saying yes, or from accidently
using 'rm -rf'.

Or you could make use of the Linux filesystem "immutable" attribute by marking (as root)
each file you want to protect:

  chattr +i file

Of course this is only usable on filesystems which support this feature.

Here are two projects which allow you to recover recently deleted files by trapping
all unlink(), rename() and open() system calls through the LD_PRELOAD facility:

  delsafe
  http://homepage.esoterica.pt/~nx0yew/delsafe/

  libtrashcan
  http://hpux.connect.org.uk/hppd/hpux/Development/Libraries/libtrash-0.2/readme.html

There are also projects which implement the FreeDesktop.org trashcan spec. For example:

  trash-cli
  http://code.google.com/p/trash-cli/

Finally, this project is a fork of GNU coreutils and adds features similar to safe-rm
to the rm command directly:

  http://wiki.github.com/d5h/rmfd/