Survey -- Move To Trash function in Python?

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, 15 May 2015 12:56 pm, Chris Angelico wrote:

> On Fri, May 15, 2015 at 12:49 PM, Ian Kelly <ian.g.kelly at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On May 14, 2015 7:55 PM, "Chris Angelico" <rosuav at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> (Though when
>>> it comes to the bikeshedding phase, I'm sure there'll be some who say
>>> "if it can't be trashed, just hard delete it", and others who say "if
>>> it can't be trashed, raise an exception". And neither is truly wrong.)
>>
>> The answer is "raise an exception". Moving to trash and deleting are
>> different operations, and one shouldn't be substituted for the other any
>> more than a failed attempt to create a hard link should create a soft
>> link instead.
>>
>> If the user wants, they can catch the exception and delete the file
>> instead. Recovering from an accidental deletion would be more difficult.
> 
> Yes, but sometimes it's at the file system's discretion - particularly
> when you're working with network mounts. The application may not even
> know that the file got hard deleted.

Citation needed.

"Move to trash" is a move operation, not an unlink. By definition, it is
reversible. Which platforms/file systems implements it as an unlink?

(I think the answer is, "broken ones".)

I've never heard of any file system implement a move to trash operation as a
primitive, it's always implemented at the application layer (desktop
management being an application for these purposes). As far as the file
system is concerned, it is just a file rename, or very occasionally if the
implementation is lousy, a copy followed by delete.



-- 
Steven