Re: Ading a wastebasket

[servis@purdue.edu]

*- Michael Meskes wrote about "Ading a wastebasket"
| Since I happen to remove files I still need quite often I'm thinking about
| adding a feature that only moves the file out of the way, but still keeps
| them on the machine.
| 
| There is only one such mechanism I know of, namely the delete program as rm
| replacement from the MIT Athena project. But for several reasons I don't
| really like it. Most importantly of course it is not really rm compatible.
| But also because it cannot prevent you from removing files from an
| application.
| 
| So I wonder whether these is a package taking care of this. Otherwise I
| might consider writing one. My idea would be to create a library that
| overloads the unlink() call. I wonder if others would be interested in this
| too.
| 
| Michael

Take a look at the entomb package that was written at Purdue
University.  

The only archive of it I could find was from comp.source.3b1 archives at
http://mathcs.rhodes.edu/~stuart/3b1/comp.sources.3b1/volume01/entomb/
in shell archive form.

A snippet of the man page for the libtomb.a library says this.

NAME
     libtomb, creat, open, rename, truncate, unlink - subroutines
     to entomb a file
[snip]
DESCRIPTION
     The  entombing  library,  libtomb.a(3x),  contains  routines
     named  creat,  open,  rename,  truncate, and unlink that are
     call-compatible with the system calls of the same names, but
     which  as a side effect may execute /usr/local/lib/entomb to
     arrange for the file in question to be entombed.

     The user may specify which files should be entombed based on
     file  name.   To  do  so,  one must introduce a list of file
     names  and/or  glob  patterns  to  the  system  through  the
     environment  variable  named ENTOMB.  ENTOMB will default to
     an internal setting if it  is  not  defined  in  the  user's
     environment.
[snip]
AUTHOR
     Matthew Bradburn, Purdue University Computing Center


>From the entomb man page,

NAME
     entomb - entomb files
[snip]
DESCRIPTION
     Entomb(8L) saves files that are otherwise destroyed by  com-
     mands  such as rm(1), mv(1), and cp(1), in effort to provide
     for user level file recovery.  When a user takes action that
     would  destroy  the  contents  of  a  file, entomb creates a
     back-up of the file and places  the  back-up  in  a  special
     directory called a "tomb."

[snip]
     Normally, entomb moves files to the tomb  with  link(2)  and
     removes  them  from  the  current  directory with unlink(2).
     However, it is often times desirable to copy a file  to  the
     tomb  instead  of  using  link  and unlink.  While generally
     slower, the copy options to entomb have the  advantage  that

[snip]
AUTHORS
     Matthew Bradburn
     Greg Becker, becker@clam.com
     Kevin Braunsdorf, ksb@cc.purdue.edu
     PUCC Unix Group

I am not affiliated with the authors in any way except that the
software runs on all the Solaris servers at Purdue and I have been
saved by it a few times.

-- 
Brian 
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Mechanical Engineering                              servis@purdue.edu
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