Linux - Restoring a file

I've written a vary basic shell script that moves a specified file into the dustbin directory. The script is as follows:

#!/bin/bash
#move items to dustbin directory
mv "$@" ~/dustbin/
echo "File moved to dustbin"

This works fine for me, any file I specify gets moved to the dustbin directory. However, what I would like to do is create a new script that will move the file in the dustbin directory back to its original directory. I know I could easily write a script that would move it back to a location specified by the user, but I would prefer to have one that would move it to its original dir开发者_StackOverflow中文版ectory.

Is this possible?

I'm using Mac OS X 10.6.4 and Terminal

You will have to store where the original file is coming from then. Maybe in a seperate file, a database, or in the files attributes (meta-data).

Create a logfile with 2 columns:

1. The complete filename in the dustbin
2. The complete original path and filename

You will need this logfile anyway - what will you do when a user deleted 2 files in different directories, but with the same name? /home/user/.wgetrc and /home/user/old/.wgetrc ?

What will you do when a user deletes a file, makes a new one with the same name, and then deletes that too? You'll need versions or timestamps or something.

You need to store the original location somewhere, either in a database or in an extended attribute of the file. A database is definitely the easiest way to do it, though an extended attribute would be more robust. Looking in ~/.Trash/ I see some, but not all files have extended attributes, so I'm not sure how Apple does it.

You need to somehow encode the source directory in the file. I think the easiest would be to change the filename in the dustbin directory. So that /home/user/music/song.mp3 becomes ~/dustbin/song.mp3|home_user_music

And when you copy it back your script needs to process the file name and construct the path beginning at |.

Another approach would be to let the filesystem be your database.

A file moved from /some/directory/somewhere/filename would be moved to ~/dustbin/some/directory/somewhere/filename and you'd do find ~/dustbin -name "$file" to find it based on its basename (from user input). Then you'd just trim "~/bustbin" from the output of find and you'd have the destination ready to use. If more than one file is returned by find, you can list the proposed files for user selection. You could use ~/dustbin/$deletiondate if you wanted to make it possible to roll back to earlier versions.

You could do a cron job that would periodically remove old files and the directories (if empty).