why isn't there an ipfs rm command?

[anarcat]

i just ran ipfs add <tons of files>. tons of stuff ended up in my local data store. i want to remove it. like now. where's the ipfs rm <tons of files>?

assuming that's the only thing i did, can i rm -rf $IPFS_DIR/datastore? (seems that no: #245).

i know about the pin command set, but the semantics are confusing to me (and others, #590).

thanks

[insanity54]

First time user here. I'm also confused on this. There is a way to add, but where is the remove? Is unpinning what I want? From the pin example I see add automatically creates a recursive pin. It must do something else besides pinning. I thought I'd figure it out from the code but it's greek to me, what a strange language, looks fun, maybe I'll learn.

[whyrusleeping]

We need more documentation around this operation, but the current method of removing content from your local datastore is to unpin it, then run an ipfs repo gc

[whyrusleeping]

ipfs rm would be a somewhat misleading command, you could do ipfs add <file that already exists elsewhere on the network>, ipfs rm <that> and then still ipfs cat <that> and it would reappear. What really needs to be done here is not ipfs rm but better pinning semantics (maybe get rid of pinning (see the end of #257 and also in #590)