Crate rmr 

Remove files or directories passed as CLI args (recursive for dirs).

Strips trailing metadata suffix beginning at the first ‘:’ in each argument (colon and suffix removed) before deletion. Useful when piping annotated paths (e.g. from linters or search tools emitting path:line:col).

Arguments

• <paths...> One or more filesystem paths (files, symlinks, or directories). Optional trailing :... suffix is removed.

Returns

• Exit code 0 if all provided paths were deleted successfully (or no paths given).
• Exit code 1 if any path failed to delete or did not exist.

Errors

• Initialization failure from color_eyre::install.
• I/O errors from std::fs::remove_file or std::fs::remove_dir_all. These are reported individually and contribute to a non-zero exit code.

Rationale

• Eliminates need for ad-hoc shell loops to mass-delete mixed file & directory sets while handling tool:line:col style suffixes.
• Colorized error reporting highlights problematic paths quickly.

Performance

• One reverse byte scan per argument to locate last ‘:’ (no allocation).
• Single symlink_metadata call per path (branches on std::fs::FileType), minimizing metadata syscalls.
• Sequential deletions avoid contention; for huge argument lists, parallelism could help but increases complexity (ordering, error aggregation).

Future Work

• Add --dry-run flag for previewing deletions.
• Add parallel deletion (configurable) for large batches.
• Accept glob patterns expanded internally (on platforms without shell globbing).

Functions

before_first_colon 🔒

Strips suffix beginning at first ‘:’; returns subslice before colon.

main 🔒

Remove files or directories passed as CLI args (recursive for dirs).

process 🔒

Deletes one path after stripping the first ‘:’ suffix segment.