rm is generally only seen on UNIX-derived operating systems, which typically do not provide for recovery of deleted files through a mechanism like the recycle bin,[2] hence the tendency for users to enclose rm in some kind of wrapper to limit accidental file deletion.

There are undelete utilities that will attempt to reconstruct the index and can bring the file back if the parts were not reused.

[3] This behaviour can still be obtained in some versions of rm with the -d flag, e.g., the BSDs (such as FreeBSD,[4] NetBSD,[5] OpenBSD[6] and macOS) derived from 4.4BSD-Lite2.

The version of rm bundled in GNU coreutils was written by Paul Rubin, David MacKenzie, Richard Stallman, and Jim Meyering.

Doug McIlroy wrote that dsw "was a desperation tool designed to clean up files with unutterable names".

[9] The command is available as a separate package for Microsoft Windows as part of the UnxUtils collection of native Win32 ports of common GNU Unix-like utilities.

This requires that one must have read and write and execute permission to that directory (if it's not empty) and all non-empty subdirectories recursively (if there are any).

Unfortunately, this tends to train users to be careless about the wildcards they hand into their rm commands, as well as encouraging a tendency to alternately pound y and the return key to affirm removes - until just past the one file they needed to keep.

[citation needed] A compromise that allows users to confirm just once, encourages proper wildcarding, and makes verification of the list easier can be achieved with something like: It is important to note that this function should not be made into a shell script, which would run a risk of it being found ahead of the system rm in the search path, nor should it be allowed in non-interactive shells where it could break batch jobs.

There exist third-party alternatives which prevent accidental deletion of important files, such as "safe-rm"[21] or "trash".

[22] GNU Core Utilities implementation used in multiple Linux distributions have limits on command line arguments.