Writing `rm` because of Windows

Problem

I happen to have a Windows laptop in my possession, and I’m stubborn enough to use it for coding. Fortunately, I am also stubborn enough to get it to work.

rm -rf doesn’t work on Windows.

Powershell on it has Remove-Item aliased to rm.
This would almost solve the problem, but…
```
Remove-Item : A parameter cannot be found that matches parameter name 'rf'.
At line:1 char:4
+ rm -rf dist
```
Powershell, unlike getopt, doesn’t allow specifying multiple options together.
rm -r -f doesn’t work too, because -f is ambiguous.
```
Remove-Item : Parameter cannot be processed because the parameter name 'f' is ambiguous.
Possible matches include: -Filter -Force.
At line:1 char:7
+ rm -r -f dist
```
All right, for a few months I’ve been writing rm -r -fo whenever I had to remove node_modules.
I aliased^[1] it to rmrf for convenience and with the following
```
function rmrf {
  param(
        [parameter(Position=0)][string]$directory
  )
  process {
     # rm -r -fo $directory
     Remove-Item -Recurse -Force $directory
  }
}
```

[1]

Powershell aliases can’t be used to partially apply arguments. Docs for Set-Alias basically tell you to write a function instead.

Alias was not enough

When I started my career in Polish companies, we often had somebody on MacOS, somebody on Linux and somebody on Windows in the team. Mac was slightly more popular as a standard company issued notebook for developers, but I remember we often had a mix.

When I work on open source, the projects are usually system agnostic (it’s not super hard in web ecosystem), using rimraf instead of rm -rf, using dotenv, writing scripts in JavaScript or Python etc.

Surprisingly, 41.2% StackOverflow Survey respondents use Windows and only 30% use MacOS.

My anecdata looks more like 75% MacOS, 15% Linux, 10% Windows, but from a perspective of open source guy, I wouldn’t want to break the build for 10% of users or lose 10% of contributors.

However, in a startup setting, the situation is totally different.

The company offered to buy me a Mac, but the orders take about 7 weeks. So, I had a choice. I could either bother my teammates to make the project system-agnostic, or deal with it on my side.

A smarter man might have gone to the store, get any MacBook they have, and be done with it.

Writing my own `rm` in Rust

Googling “rm for Windows” didn’t get me any useful results, so I quickly wrote my own, very dirty, totally not production-grade, rm to stick in my bin directory.

Disclaimer: Writing the code took me less time than I’ve been writing this note, so I provide no guarantees to the quality and correctness of the code. I didn’t even write any error messages, because exposing the error from std::fs is totally fine for my use case.

main.rs

use clap::Parser;

#[derive(Parser, Debug)]
#[clap(author, version, about, long_about = None)]
struct Args {
  #[clap(short, long)]
  recursive: bool,

  #[clap(short, long)]
  force: bool,

  #[clap()]
  files: Vec<String>,
}

fn rm(args: Args) -> std::io::Result<()> {
  for file in args.files {
      if args.recursive {
          if args.force {
              std::fs::remove_dir_all(file)?;
          } else {
              std::fs::remove_dir(file)?;
          }
      } else {
          std::fs::remove_file(file)?;
      }
  }

  return std::io::Result::Ok(());
}

fn main() {
  let args = Args::parse();
  Result::unwrap(rm(args))
}

Cargo.toml

[package]
name = "rust-rm"
version = "0.1.0"
edition = "2021"

[dependencies]
clap = { version = "3.1.18", features = ["derive"] }

I removed the alias by adding the following to my $PROFILE.

Remove-Item -Path Alias:rm

I promptly ran cargo build --release and I added my newest toy to a directory I already had in PATH.

❯ ls

    Directory: D:\tools\bin

Mode                 LastWriteTime         Length Name
----                 -------------         ------ ----
-a----        04/05/2022     16:24           1128 colormode.ps1
-a----        11/05/2022     17:00         654848 rm.exe
-a----        12/07/2021     16:21              8 sh.cmd
-a----        07/07/2021     15:01         782336 tr.exe
-a----        20/07/2021     13:16            637 xargs.cmd

Problem

rm -rf doesn’t work on Windows.

Alias was not enough

Writing my own rm in Rust

Writing my own `rm` in Rust