Safe-rm

/lib32 and /lib64 now blacklisted by default in safe-rm 0.9

2013-01-11T22:19:00.003+13:00

A new version of safe-rm was released to add the (relatively) new /lib32 and /lib64 directories to the default blacklist. Thanks to Michael Tomkins for the suggestion!

Contributing your list of protected paths to safe-rm

2010-04-15T11:12:00.003+12:00

This is an open invitation to all safe-rm users to send in their personal lists of protected paths so that some of these can hopefully be included in a future release.

safe-rm is all about preventing little disasters and part of this involves shipping a default set of paths to protect from deletion. I've tried to guess what would be useful to people, but it's very likely that I have a missed a number of critical paths that people care about.

So if you're happy with sharing your configuration, please consider emailing your /etc/safe-rm.conf or ~/.safe-rm to francois@safe-rm.org.nz.

Removal of a perl dependency in 0.8

2009-10-15T20:01:00.002+13:00

The latest version of safe-rm removes an unnecessary dependency on the English Perl module. This makes safe-rm more robust during upgrades of the core Perl packages.

Thanks to all of those who have reported problems on the Debian bug tracker!

CDPATH-related fix in safe-rm 0.7

2009-09-23T13:49:00.004+12:00

Version 0.7 of safe-rm fixes a small untainting problem for people who have CDPATH defined in their environment. Others can safely skip this release and stick to version 0.6.

Thanks to John Ferlito, who inadvertently deleted part of his /usr/lib, for this fix!

safe-rm 0.6 no longer protects symlinks

2009-05-22T21:30:00.002+12:00

The new release of safe-rm, version 0.6, fixes a bug which caused symbolic links to protected files to be undeletable. Therefore if you create a symlink to /usr/lib, you will now be able to delete it without having to use the real rm explicitly.

You can still use safe-rm to protect regular files and directories from accidental deletion using the rm command, but symbolic links will no longer be protected.

Another minor enhancement included in this release is the change in the message displayed by safe-rm when a protected file is skipped. The new message should now make it explicit who is to blame when a file isn't being deleted.

Wildcards in safe-rm 0.5

2009-04-02T23:25:00.001+13:00

In addition to protecting specific files and directories from accidental deletion, this release of safe-rm introduces support for wildcards in protected paths.

Minor improvements were also made to the documentation and overall code quality.

Many thanks to Dave Jones for his help in getting this release in shape.

safe-rm 0.4 adds protection for the root directory

2008-11-01T12:07:00.005+13:00

A new release of safe-rm is now available from the usual place.

The main change in this release is a fix for a bug that was preventing the root directory (/) from being added to the list of protected paths. Safe-rm is now able to protect you from the infamous rm -rf /.

I highly recommend that you now add / to your /etc/safe-rm.conf.

Thanks to Mubeen Jukaku for reporting this problem!

safe-rm 0.3 now available

2008-09-08T18:06:00.001+12:00

This new safe-rm release fixes a rather important bug: safe-rm would miss files in the current directory while checking the arguments against the blacklist.

You should upgrade as soon as possible to make sure that the full protection is enabled.

Thanks to Yi-Feng Tzeng for letting me know about this problem!

safe-rm 0.2 released

2008-06-09T23:19:00.000+12:00

After going through the feedback I received about safe-rm 0.1, I decided to cut a new release with a number of enhancements and bug fixes including:

support for system-wide protected path list
support for user-specific protected path list
fix for infinite loops before using the "real" rm

Packages for safe-rm are now available in Debian and Ubuntu.

safe-rm 0.1 released

2008-06-08T22:16:00.000+12:00

As mentioned on the debian-devel mailing list, I recently deleted my /usr/lib by mistake and had to go through the pain of reinstalling all of my Debian packages. So I wrote a little Perl script which I have now aliased to "rm" in my .bashrc.

Basically, the wrapper has a blacklist which contains directories like /usr/lib, /home, /etc and removes those before passing its arguments to the real 'rm' command.

I'm probably not the only person to have made this mistake and who wants to avoid doing it again. So I'm thinking of turning it into something that's useful to other people (probably packaging it in some form).

I realize that 'rm' is a low-level command which should do what it's told, but the reality is that a lot of people use it directly on a daily basis and can accidently hose their system. I don't want to implement a "command-line trashcan", but I'm looking for a way to prevent me from doing things I should never ask for (like 'rm -rf /usr/lib/').