Trash Filing System

This is a script (function) to be added to a bashrc. The purpose is to not actually remove files, but rather to send them to a trash folder for safe keeping. I was tired of deleting important files. Because files may have the same name, I chose to create subdirectories with the date and file name on them, for easy access and to prevent conflicts.

Thoughts? Improvements I could make? This is my first BASH script function, and I'd love to make it a standard part of my computers, so I want to make it good first!

function rm { 
    PREFIX="~/.Trash";
    for FILE in "$@" ; do 
        STARDATE=`date +%Y%m%d-%H%M`;
        PLACE="${STARDATE}-${FILE}" ; 
        mkdir -p "${PREFIX}/${PLACE}"; 
        mv $FILE $PREFIX/$PLACE/$FILE ; 
        echo "${FILE} moved to ${PREFIX}/${PLACE}" ; 
    done
}

Interesting idea! I propose to rewrite the script this way:

rm() { 
    TRASH=~/.Trash
    for FILE; do
        DATE=$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M)
        TARGETDIR="$TRASH/$DATE-$FILE"
        mkdir -p "$TARGETDIR"
        mv -v "$FILE" "$TARGETDIR/"
    done
}

What I changed and why:

• for i; do is equivalent to for i in "$@"; do but shorter

• In PREFIX="~/.Trash", the ~ does NOT expand to your home directory, so I believe this is a bug. And since there's nothing to quote in .Trash either, you can just write PREFIX=~/.Trash without any quoting

• Instead of an echo after the mv, you can use the -v flag to make mv more verbose and speak for itself

• Correctly quoted everywhere it's necessary

• Changed the deprecated `cmd style command substitution to the new recommended $(cmd) style

• Renamed variables to be more intuitive, though I know this is subjective:

• PREFIX to TRASH, to be more specific and clear

• STARDATE to DATE, because I don't know what is "STAR" and DATE alone is already pretty clear

• combined PREFIX + PLACE to TARGETDIR to reduce duplication

• Changed function rm { to rm() {, because this seems to be the preferred way to declare functions in bash






• Removed all the trailing ;, you don't need them






• Use $VARNAME instead of ${VARNAME}, because I find that easier to read, but do as you like




Personally I would rename rm() to trash(),
because most of the time I certainly don't want to backup everything,
especially when deleting directories.
trash` also seems intuitive.

By the way, this is a great site to check your Bash scripts for common mistakes:

http://www.shellcheck.net/#

StackExchange Code Review Q#53753, answer score: 7