TIL rmw—Remove to Waste

June 16, 2021

I’ve learned about a nice litle cli utitliy: rmw

rmw (ReMove to Waste) is a safe-remove utility for the command line.
It can move and restore files to and from directories specified in a configuration file, and can also be integrated with your regular desktop trash folder (if your desktop environment uses the FreeDesktop.org Trash specification).
—src: remove-to-waste.info

The utitliy is written in C, open source, and has a GNU GPLv3 License.

And.It.Just.Works.

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On first usage it creats a default configuration file at ~/.config/rmwrc along w/ a default waste directory structure at ~/.local/share/Waste.

To make it work w/ my GNOME desktop (on Debian Buster) I only hat to adjust the path to the waste directory like so:

# ~/.config/rmwrc  
WASTE = $HOME/.local/share/Trash  

I can now delete remove a file to trash waste like so:

rmw some-file-to-be-deleted.txt  

To ultimately purge the file, I just need to Empty Trash from GNOME Files app, which I do anyway 🤞.