I am a newbie. I set an alias in .bashrc file as follow.
alias myrm='mv /home/user/Trash/*'
The purpose is that when I use myrm comment, for example $myrm foo, the file "foo" has to be moved to the Trash folder which is in my home folder (/home/user/Trash).
Then I did
$source ~/.bashrc
After this, when I try to use myrm by typing $myrm foo, I get the following error message.
mv: cannot stat ‘/home/user/Trash/*’: No such file or directory
How this problem can be solved?
First of all, you don’t use $ when you call an alias.
$ is for expanding a variable (and a few other things
that aren’t particularly relevant to this question).
But, secondly, aliases do work a little like variables,
in the sense that they (at the risk of oversimplifying a little)
just expand to a bunch of words.
You say you want to do myrm foo,
but that would expand to mv /home/user/Trash/* foo,
which doesn’t make sense.
A simple solution would be
to define the alias to be mv -t /home/user/Trash,
which would work because mv supports the
mv -t destination_dir file …syntax as an alternative to the
mv file … destination_dirsyntax.
But you can get greater flexibility with a shell function. These combine the flexibility of scripts with the (low) overhead of aliases. For example,
myrm() { mv "$@" /home/user/Trash; }
will cause myrm foo to be interpreted as mv foo /home/user/Trash.
Probably easier solution is to use trash-cli package. Then you can just do alias myrm=trash and then trash foo to accomplish what you want to. Except that foo will now go to ~/. local/share/Trash
The problem is, with mv you have to use it like mv source destination.
With your alias it's vice-versa mv destination source.
Also you don't need the asterisk * at the end, because it works with the destination as a folder. Make sure your folder /home/user/Trash exists with mkdir /home/user/Trash.
To solve your alias idea, I would recommend you to have a look at this stackoverflow questions:
This will lead to that solution; please add this to your ~/.bashrc and do a source ~/.bashrc after adding:
myrm() {
/bin/mv "$@" /home/user/Trash/
}
As stated in comments, the mv syntax is different you can do :
myrm(){ mv "$@" $HOME/Trash/; }
that can handle multiple files as argument
However this simple alias does not handle file name collision, as well as metadata (from where it has been removed, ...).
For a more complete solution, you can simply use the package trash-cli which is pretty good and come with few tools (eg. empty files thar are in the trash for X days, ...).
There is another useful alias you could consider if you have gvfs-bin package installed in your host:
alias myrm='gvfs-trash`
It moves your files to the bin. Also, the proper files are written in your $TRASH folder (such as info/, files/ ...). So you don't have to worry for that. Example : Going in the bin and clicking restore will perfectly work.
That's redundant with trash-cli but your host may have only one of them already installed, so if you don't have trash-cli, give it a try.
You need to do
mv "$1" /home/user/Trash/mv -t /home/user/Trash/mv /home/user/Trash/