rm

Also known as: GNU coreutils rm

The original disk-space reclaim: Unix's file-removal utility since the First Edition (1971), today usually GNU coreutils on Linux and the BSD variant on macOS. No scan, no preview, no undo, no announcement post - the aesthetic opposite of most of this catalog.

Platforms

Interface

Tech stack

Other

C (GNU coreutils; BSD userland implementations)

Dev-junk cleaning

Not a focus

Development

Community collective · continued under new maintainer

Unix utility since 1971; today maintained inside GNU coreutils (Linux) and the BSD variants (macOS) by successive generations of maintainers.

License

GPL

GPL-3.0 (GNU coreutils); BSD-licensed variants ship with macOS and the BSDs

Price

Free

Included with the OS

Launched

1971

first_release_at

First release

1971

Last seen alive

Oct 20, 2026

Checks

Mechanical checks derived from the fields above. Each row is one fact; "not yet checked" means exactly that, not a failure. There is no composite score; read them together.

Track record	about 55 years
Source published	Yes
Release signing	Signed
Security contact	Yes
Reproducible builds	Not yet checked
Telemetry	None
Runs elevated	Never
Auto-update channel	None
Recent activity	Last seen 11 days ago

GPL coreutils; shipped and signed through each distro's package channel
Bug and security reports via bug-coreutils@gnu.org and distro CVE processes
Runs with the caller's privileges: no setuid, no daemon, no updater

Research notes

POSIX-specified. Every 'safe delete with review' feature in the rest of the catalog is, at some level, ceremony added on top of what rm does immediately.
rm -rf remains the load-bearing joke of system cleaning.

Sources

URL	Role	Status	Checked	Archive
www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/	homepage	200	2026-10-20

Wrong, stale, or missing something? Flag this listing: corrections reach the site operator, not rm's developer.