You can make a trash command if you want and a cron job to periodically remove everything over x days old.

The default rm doesn't do this because shell users are supposed to be able to figure out how not to delete things they want to keep.

Kind of like not pointing a gun at people who you don't want to kill.

The undo for rm is regular backups.

Journaling works well here too, but in my experience the interface sucks on every platform. Eg, it should be trivial to view recent unlinks. There’s simply more reason to invest in backup software, which has an excellent interface even if it is a “heavy” operation.

That is not what journaling is for. Journaling is for maintaining filesystem consistency. If you want access to recently deleted files that is a different task.

On my system I have snapshots of my home directory created every 15 minutes. Not quite the same thing, but it also helps me when I have incorrectly modified a file.

Well, it’s a loss for us all that the designers were not more imaginative.

> e.g. why doesn't `rm` just move files to /tmp?

And do what when tmp gets full and services & applications start crashing?

When someone implements that undo, someone's going to need to write a tool that really does remove files, really. Will the next guy wonder why really-rm doesn't have undo built in?

What about undo that expires in 1 minutes? Gmail website does that for sent emails (for 5 seconds I guess).

> What about undo that expires in 1 minutes? Gmail website does that for sent emails (for 5 seconds I guess).

Same question as parent: "And do what when tmp gets full and services & applications start crashing?"

You could do what is more or less an industry standard when it comes to this and warn the user that there's not enough room to allow an undo when deleting said file(s) and prompt if they want to delete it permanently instead.

It's not rocket surgery.

I'm never that nervous when doing `rm -fr` on my Plan9 or FreeBSD or macOS systems, which all have frequent snapshots turned on.

We could all just work with WORM drives instead.

I am similarly not worried on my Linux system, which also has frequent snapshots turned on. Instead I worry about bugs in btrfs, but that is another story.

> It's always been surprising to me that their isn't a built in "undo" to `rm`

Have a look at either the `trash-cli` package by Andrea Francia.

Mildly related, I wish rm would check that you’re not unlinking the current directory. I’ve never wanted the behavior when I accidentally invoke it.

alias rm to rm -i (always prompt)

I don't do this because my idiocy must be punished disproportionately. Also, you end up automatically pressing y enter.

sysadmin here, yep, aliases are how I deal with dangerous commands as well.

And when you get used to your carefully curated crutches and have to work on someone else's machine, that's where the fun starts.

Aliases can be way more dangerous; think about what you're doing. This is what backups are for.

This is true, which is why I dont use them much!

You could easily make rm inactive (remove execute flag, move it, ...) and make rm an alias for send to trash (gvfs-trash, trash-cli, or whatever).