Iron Bin

Iron Bin, a CLI for the Freedesktop trash written in Rust 🦀.

Usage

Iron Bin consists of a single command: trash.

To list the files in the trash:

trash list

or

trash ls

The output is similar to that of the ls command, but the original paths are always absolute:

/home/johndoe/Documents/Invoice.pdf
/home/johndoe/Documents/Notes.doc
/home/johndoe/Downloads/funny.jpg

To display more details, add the -v option:

trash list -v

The output is similar to that of the ls -l command, but the columns are a bit different:

total 3
       size  deletion time             original path
   36196652  Mon Sep  8 22:11:09 2025  /home/johndoe/Documents/Invoice.pdf
    4668381  Mon Sep  8 22:11:09 2025  /home/johndoe/Documents/Notes.doc
     568731  Tue Sep  9 09:24:37 2025  /home/johndoe/Downloads/funny.jpg

Note: The same file may appear several times in the trash if it was put there at several different times.

To put a file in the trash:

trash put Downloads/message.txt

To prompt for confirmation before each file, add the -i option (similar to the rm -i command):

trash put -i Downloads/*

To display a summary, add the -v option:

trash put Downloads/message.txt

trashed /home/johndoe/Downloads/message.txt on Mon Nov 24 19:02:16 2025
total 1 trashed

To restore a file from the trash:

trash restore /home/johndoe/Documents/Notes.doc

You can restore several files at once:

trash restore /home/johndoe/Documents/Notes.doc /home/johndoe/Downloads/funny.jpg

Note: If the same file was put in the trash several times, the most recent version is restored.

To prompt for confirmation before each file, add the -i option (similar to the mv -i command):

trash restore -i /home/johndoe/Documents/Notes.doc

To display a summary, add the -v option:

trash restore -v /home/johndoe/Documents/Notes.doc

restored /home/johndoe/Documents/Notes.doc trashed on Mon Sep  8 22:11:09 2025
total 1 restored

To empty the trash:

trash empty

A confirmation prompt is displayed. To skip it, add the -f option:

trash empty -f

Limitations

• Only the home trash is supported
• Only UTF-8 file names are supported

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.

License

Iron Bin is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0. See LICENSE.

Similar projects

• trash-cli (Python)

Development

Overview

Iron Bin is written in Rust. This project is a Cargo workspace where the following crates are the most important:

• iron-bin: the library that provides the Trash struct
• trash: the trash binary, which is essentially a CLI for the iron-bin library

Git hooks

It is recommended to use the Git hooks provided with this project. This can be easily achieved with Smee.