rm: delete S3 objects

mito rm <s3-url> [OPTIONS]

rm deletes one S3 object, or everything under a prefix.

It is the only command here that destroys data on purpose, so it is built to be hard to trigger by accident.

Options

Two locks on the door

You have to get past both of these before anything is deleted.

   mito rm s3://bucket/logs/
        │
        ▼
   is it a prefix, with no -r ?  ──► yes ──►  ERROR, exit 2
        │                                     (not a no-op,
        no                                     not a mass delete)
        ▼
   was -f given ?                ──► no  ──►  PREVIEW only,
        │                                     nothing deleted
        yes
        ▼
   delete

The first lock means a prefix always needs --recursive. Pointing rm at s3://bucket/logs/ without it is an error. It does not quietly do nothing, and it certainly does not delete everything.

The second means nothing is deleted without --force. Leave it off and you get a preview of exactly what would go.

mito rm s3://my-bucket/old-data/            # error: prefix needs -r
mito rm s3://my-bucket/old-data/ -r         # preview of the recursive delete
mito rm s3://my-bucket/old-data/ -rf        # do it
mito rm s3://my-bucket/file.txt --force     # a single object

The habit worth building: run it once without -f, read the list, then add -f to the same command.

--batch

By default each object is deleted with its own request, -t of them at a time.

--batch switches to the DeleteObjects API, which removes up to 1000 keys in a single request. Over a large prefix this is much faster. It is also much more likely to draw throttling responses from S3.

Use it when you are deleting a lot and you are not competing with production traffic.

On AWS S3, DELETE requests are free either way. So this choice is about speed and throttling, not cost.

Exit status

See Exit codes.