What is safe-rm?

Safe-rm is a safety tool intended to prevent the accidental deletion of important files by replacing /bin/rm with a wrapper, which checks the given arguments against a configurable blacklist of files and directories that should never be removed.

Users who attempt to delete one of these protected files or directories will not be able to do so and will be shown a warning message instead:

    $ rm -rf /usr
    Skipping /usr

(Protected paths can be set both at the site and user levels.)

Recovering important files you deleted by mistake can be quite hard. Protect yourself today by installing safe-rm and reduce the likelihood that you will need to contact a data recovery service!

(Linux/UNIX source code).

2009-09-23

CDPATH-related fix in safe-rm 0.7

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!

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