Solaris

Replacing the rm command does only part of the job. It does not help if a compiled program deletes a file via system call. There are also shells (like ksh93) which have a builtin rm command,

It's the same like under Windows, where the recycle bin is a feature of the graphical shell, not the operating system. If you open a command window and delete a file, then it is gone and not in the recycle bin.

HI hergp...

thn hw to proceed further.. can u brife it... as said earlier i was planning to create an alias rm.

Can you elaborate, in which cases the recycle bin should work and in which not?

Creating an alias to your own shell script (as robsonde suggested) works only for scripts or interactive shells that use this alias -> all others ... no effect

Replacing /usr/bin/rm with a script to place the file in the recylce bin works for all scripts and interactive shells -> no effect on compiled programs or shells with builtin rm command. And I doubt that it is such a great idea to replace an operating system command.

Writing a kernel module which intercepts the unlink system call and places the files to be deleted in the recycle bin -> effect on the whole system, but extremly high sophisticated and with a lot of side effects.

So, what should it be?

If you are running Solaris 10 or newer, dtrace allows a userland implementation of such a kernel module:

Code:

#!/bin/ksh

[[ ! -d /var/tmp/trashcan ]] && pfexec mkdir /var/tmp/trashcan
export IFS="$(printf "\t")"
dtrace -qwn '
syscall::fsat:entry /arg0 == 5/ {
  printf("%d\t%d\t%d\t%s\t%s\n", walltimestamp, pid, uid, cwd, copyinstr(arg2));
  stop()
}
syscall::unlink:entry {
  printf("%d\t%d\t%d\t%s\t%s\n", walltimestamp, pid, uid, cwd, copyinstr(arg2));
  stop()
}' | while read walltimestamp pid uid cwd filename
do
  save=/var/tmp/trashcan/$(basename $filename).$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)
  cd $cwd
  echo "$walltimestamp: $uid [$cwd] [$filename]" >> /var/tmp/trashcan/logs
  cp "$filename" "$save"
  prun $pid
done

File removal performance will be strongly impacted by this script. Moreover, beware of disk full situations that might quickly happen should you let it running forever.

Great use of dtrace, jlliagre! Thanks for the idea.

HI Jiliarge,

Could you pls explain the wat it does and wat should i do... still am a student in Solaris :-(

It does precisely what hergp suggested: "Writing a kernel module which intercepts the unlink system call and places the files to be deleted in the recycle bin".
The recycle bin is /var/tmp/trashcan. Every deleted file is placed there suffixed by its deletion date.
A log file, /var/tmp/trashcan/log, is telling who deleted what and when.