Getting Started

Installation

If you already have Python 3.7 on your system, you can install delete using Pip.

pip install delete-cli

Basic Usage

Calling delete with no arguments or with the --help flag yield typically Unix style behavior, print a usage or help statement, respectively. For detailed usage and examples you can read the manual page, man delete.

Deleting files and folders is as simple as:

delete file1.txt file2.txt folderA

Files or folders that get deleted with the same basename will have a suffix added before the extension (e.g., file1.1.txt, file1.2.txt, …).

Restore files using their basename (in the trash), their full path (in the trash) or their original full path.

delete --restore file1.txt
delete --restore $TRASH_FOLDER/file2.txt
delete --restore /original/path/folderA

List the contents of the trash along with their original full paths.

delete --list

Use --empty to completely empty the trash. This does not remove the $TRASH_FOLDER. It iterates through the full listing of contents from the $TRASH_DATABASE. If anything is left in the directory an error is logged.

delete --empty

Recommendations

Add the following to your shell’s login profile to shorten the invocation.

alias del="delete"

Known Issues

  • On macOS systems the default ~/.Trash is protected and does not allow a listing of the directory. delete functions normally aside from an error message being printed when using --empty.