How the Thanos.sh Script Randomly Deletes Half of Your Files on macOS

Project Overview

The Thanos.sh project is an open‑source shell script that randomly selects half of the regular files in the current directory and outputs their contents. Replacing the cat command with rm makes the script delete the selected files.

Installation on macOS

macOS requires brew and the GNU coreutils package, which provides gshuf (a GNU implementation of shuf). Install them with:

# Install Homebrew
/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
# Install coreutils (provides gshuf)
brew install coreutils

Script Details

#!/bin/sh
let "i=`find . -type f | wc -l`/2"
if [[ uname=="Darwin" ]]; then
    find . -not -name "Thanos.sh" -type f -print0 | gshuf -z -n $i | xargs -0 -- cat
else
    find . -not -name "Thanos.sh" -type f -print0 | shuf -z -n $i | xargs -0 -- cat
fi
# To delete instead of display, replace 'cat' with 'rm'

Explanation

Count all regular files in the current directory and divide by two (stored in variable i).

List all files, excluding the script itself, using find with null‑terminated output.

On macOS, pipe the list to gshuf; on other Unix‑like systems, use shuf to randomly select $i entries.

Pass the selected file paths to xargs, which runs cat to display their contents. Replace cat with rm to delete them.

Safety Notice

The script is destructive and has no undo capability. It should only be used in controlled, experimental environments; running it on personal machines or production systems can cause irreversible data loss.

Repository

GitHub: https://github.com/hotvulcan/Thanos.sh/ (1.8K stars, 235 forks)