trash-d

A near drop-in replacement for rm that uses the FreeDesktop trash bin. Written in the D programming language using only D's Phobos standard library, and can be compiled with any recent D compiler. This includes GCC, so trash-d should run on any *NIX platform that GCC supports.

ONLY LINUX AND BSD ARE CURRENTLY SUPPORTED!

Windows won't work at all, and MacOS probably won't either (see note below). Any POSIX and FreeDesktop compliant system should work fine. For rarer *NIXs like Solaris or AIX, you're on your own though. PRs for expanding support are very welcome!

You can install a pre-built statically-linked version (x86_64-linux) from the GitHub releases page

MacOS Note: As of v18 MacOS is semi-supported. It builds and passes all tests on MacOS 13.1 (and likely will on most earlier versions too). However it still uses the FreeDesktop trash bin which is not "native" to MacOS. Contributions to improve this would be appreciated!

I gave a brief informal talk about this project and D at DoomConf 2021 (recording is a bit messed up and only has half my talk) you can see also the slides here. I later re-wrote and updated/expanded on the presentation as a blog post.

There are also several posts on the D forums about trash-d, if you want to give those a read.

Maintenance Status: Stable

trash-d is reasonable stable and feature complete, so updates might be slow. But it is still maintained and bug reports are welcome!

Installing

Simply drop the trash binary somewhere on your $PATH such as $HOME/.local/bin, or use the provided DEB and RPM packages from the releases page.

You can install on Mac or Linux using Homebrew with...

brew install rushsteve1/pkgs/trash-d

Alternatively if there is a package for your OS you should probably use that.

Optionally set alias rm=trash in your shell config to replace usages of rm with trash-d.

Usage

Using trash-d is the same as most other command line utilities, and intentionally very similar to rm.

See the manual for more information.

Building

trash-d can be built using any D compiler, but it uses Dub and DMD by default. You may need to adapt the build scripts, but the code should be completely portable.

You can build it with Dub using dub build and run tests with dub test.

CMake build files can be generated using dub generate cmake.

Using Rake

trash-d uses Ruby and Rake for it's build tooling. These are technically optional and are not required to actually build the project, but make things easier. Use rake -T to list all the available tasks.

To install all Ruby dependencies use

gem install --no-format-executable rake ronn-ng fpm

Ruby is required to build the manual page from the markdown file using Ronn-ng and can easily be built with rake manpage. You may also need the ruby-devel and rpmbuild system packages. Install these from your distro's package manager.

Contributing

Contributions welcome! Please come help me clean up my D code, and otherwise make trash-d more useful!

In particular help with packaging trash-d for various distros and expanding support for other operating systems would be greatly appreciated!

However keep in mind that this is a simple tool with a simple job, so it's never going to do that much.

Patches are also accepted via email if that's more your jam, see Contact below for more info.

Version Numbers

Versions of trash-d are numbered sequentially with a bump every time I change some functionality. Consider every change to be a breaking change, and be happily surprised when it's not! I have a bad habit of bumping the number with one commit, only to immediately bump it again before tagging a release. So the releases might have some gaps. Sorry about that...

Version names are changed whenever something major has changed. Don't treat these like actual version indicators, they're just something fun.

License

trash-d is licensed under the terms of the MIT License. You are free to use it for any purpose under the terms of that license.

Similar Projects

• https://github.com/andreafrancia/trash-cli
• https://github.com/sindresorhus/trash
• https://github.com/theimpossibleastronaut/rmw/
• https://github.com/alphapapa/rubbish.py
• https://github.com/kaelzhang/shell-safe-rm
• https://github.com/nateshmbhat/rm-trash
• https://github.com/PhrozenByte/rmtrash
• https://github.com/icyphox/crap
• https://github.com/ali-rantakari/trash

Unlike many of these, trash-d does not require an interpreter like Bash or Python, so is more easily portable to new systems.

Contact

You can email me at mailto:[email protected] or open an issue here on GitHub if you need to reach me for whatever reason.

We do not have a mailing list or anything of that sort, but there is an ATOM feed of releases.