I recently permanently delete some files because of habit using, rm -fr ./file.txt, ops. So I looked into creating a bash function to delete files and just move them into a system temporary folder for auto delayed deletion.
There are multiply system temporary location on a mac,
/tmp – Used for short temp files. This directory is available on system startup. Some system are setup to use this directory in memory storage only.
/var/temp – Used for bigger files. Because this is in the VAR directory it needs to be mounted and thus not available until then(after startup).
$TMPDIR – Is a temp directory variable, this is the recommended location to store temp files on OSX.
These directories are cleaned up differently on different systems.
Below is the line I added to my ~/.bash_profile
del() { mv $1 $TMPDIR; };
This will add a function called del that will move a file into the $TMPDIR. This will allow the file to be queried for deletion, but also allows for a short recovery time.
View my sample .bash_profile:
https://github.com/johnfreier/scripts/blob/master/linux/.bash_profile