remmy

rm -rf, 3× faster on macOS.

Quickstart

You can grab a remmy version from the Releases page. Builds are static and exist for Linux (x86_64, aarch64, armv7l, ppc64le, s390x) and Apple Silicon macOS 15+:

curl -fsSL "https://github.com/markovejnovic/remmy/releases/latest/download/remmy-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m).tar.gz" | tar -xz
sudo install -m 0755 "remmy-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)/remmy" /usr/local/bin/remmy

remmy has the exact-same interface and semantics as your macOS rm and you can run:

remmy -r node_modules/

If you trust remmy enough, you can add an alias in your .bashrc to use remmy instead of rm:

echo "alias rm='/usr/local/bin/remmy'" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Donationware

Remmy is donationware. That means that if you like remmy, if you like my work and if you want to support remmy or me, you should donate. I like money as much as the next person, but I don't need it. There are people who do. Here are some institutions you can consider:

• 🌍 United World College transformed my life by taking me from a backwater swamp and opening my eyes to different cultures, worldly cultures of thought and helping me be financially secure. Help provide kids the same opportunity. My cohort are all amazing people who are all transforming the world.
• 🇮🇷 Children of Persia is a fund which provides sustainable healthcare and education support to children in Iran. With the ongoing war, children need our support more than ever. Iran is is one of the west's most important cultures and the hell children have to experience in Iran is a disgrace and an insult to Persia's critical impact to the Greco-Roman legacy. Help kids in Iran have the opportunity to survive. (Note this is one of the few charities which directly supports Iran and UN donors can support.)
• 🇵🇸 Palestine Children's Relief Fund provides medical care to injured and ill children who need access to medical care. Help kids survive war. The ugly reality is many won't and we have to help as many as we can. If you care about basic survival for kids in war, this is your best donation place.
• 🇺🇳 UNICEF Early Childhood Development Kit provides toys across the world to reduce the severity of developmental issues to kids caught in conflicts. For many of its faults, UNICEF has helped the war-torn country I found myself growing up in. Help toddlers and very young children develop.
• 🇺🇸 Donors Choose is empirically proven to improve kids scores in US schools by about 1%. If you care about supporting kids in the US, this is the one.
• 🇨🇳 Standford REAP aims to make an educational improvement in rural China. Roughly 85% of toddlers growing up in rural China experience development delay. During my high-school, I have met with some of the wonderful, bright and curious kids in rural schools from Hubei. Help rural Chinese kids avoid developmental delays and improve education For any Chinese natives, please reach out to me if you know of a better charity that suits China's needs better.

Our future is, by definition, in the hands of our children. The only effective way towards peace and escape from the ecological damnation is if we pour everything we can into our future. Email me your receipt for any of the aforementioned and I will match with a total cap of up to $1K/mo. Hopefully I can figure out a better way to handle matching, but email is the best way for now.

Compatibility

My goal is to ensure that remmy is one-for-one compatible with rm. I've worked at Bun for a brief period and I really know how annoying it is if tools aren't compatible with the standard. remmy prioritizes compatibility over performance.

If your rm and remmy output are not the same and not documented here, yell at me.

Known Incompatibilities

All known divergences between Apple's rm and remmy are documented here.

Interactive Mode

rm -i asks remove a? before each file and, with -r, examine files in directory d? before entering a directory. remmy does not support this yet. The issue is tracked in #39.

Write Protection Prompt

When stdin is a terminal and neither -f nor -i is given, rm asks before removing a file you cannot write to. remmy does not support this. The issue is tracked in #40.

-P, -W and -x

• -P: rm opens each regular file for writing before removing it, so a read-only file fails with Permission denied, even under -f. remmy ignores -P. The issue is tracked in #43.
• -W without -r is refused. The issue is tracked in #42.
• -x with -r is refused. The issue is tracked in #41.

FTS Corner Cases

rm -r walks with fts(3), and a few of its quirks are not copied yet:

• A directory that can be listed but not entered (mode 0444) is reported once as Permission denied and left alone; remmy reports it differently.
• At the root of a mounted volume, rm skips the hidden HFS+ metadata entries silently and ends with Resource busy; remmy prints more errors.
• An operand l/, where l is a symlink to . or .., is walked through the link by rm and ends in No such file or directory.

Repeated Operands Misbehave

• Repeated or nested operands. rm -rv d d removes d, then reports d: No such file or directory for the second one. remmy starts on the second operand while the first is still being removed, so both race and the messages depend on timing. Fixing this is tracked in #27.

Verbose Ordering

-v output and error messages behave differently. rm prints them in depth-first order. remmy walks sibling directories in parallel, so the same lines come out in a different order. This is expected and will not change.

Performance

I've spent a lot of time optimizing remmy. Here's how it compares to other options for removing directories:

Tool	Time	Files/s	vs. rm
remmy (4 threads)	0.63 s	60k	2.6×
find | xargs -P4 rm	1.10 s	35k	1.48×
GNU rm -rf	1.39 s	28k	1.17×
remmy (1 thread)	1.40 s	27k	1.16×
bfs -delete	1.43 s	27k	1.13×
find -delete	1.52 s	25k	1.07×
/bin/rm -rf	1.62 s	24k	1.0×
find | xargs rm	1.84 s	21k	0.88×

Here's what remmy does (or doesn't do) to speed stuff up.

1. Avoids calling stat It reads raw directory entries with getdirentries64.
2. Walks in parallel. Each directory is a task on a Chase–Lev work-stealing scheduler.
3. Deletes relative to open directories. Every unlink is an unlinkat against a descriptor it already holds, so the kernel never looks up a full path.
4. Avoids allocations. Almost every spot where a naive application would allocate, remmy tries really hard not to. Even CLI parsing skips allocations.

Detailed Benchmarks

TODO

Contributing

Thank you for wanting to contribute! Here are some quick notes:

AI Disclosure

I have used AI in this project. remmy, for the most-part, is hand-written. Areas where code has not been hand-written and/or have had a cursory, rudimentary review, are marked as such. These are generally low-risk areas. None of the tests are hand-written.

Note that I expect all PRs to use no more AI than I have.

Some Contributing Rules

• Be nice and respectful in the issues/PRs. If you are mean to people, I will immediately ban you from the project.
• Note the license is not open-source. It is very close to GPLv3, but it is not GPLv3. For the most part, this is due to an exclusion for the Omarchy project to use remmy.
• You are very welcome to open issues and/or PRs. I will do my absolute best to help you push your PRs across the finish line.
• I will not accept AI PRs. I get to use AI because I maintain the project and I understand what my agents are doing. I do not understand what your agents are doing. You are welcome to use AI as much as you want, but AI-generated PRs, overly-documented slop PRs will be immediately closed. I expect you to understand your code as if you wrote it by hand. I will label delinquent PRs as such and you are more than welcome to ping me if you think I misclassified your PR. You are welcome to use aggressive AI for tests, and I will perform only a cursory review on those as the risk is minor.

License

Source-available, not open source. See LICENSE.