Anyone who uses linux or unix-like systems will, at some point, shoot themselves in the foot with rm and *. I, after several years of being careful, just joined the glorious ranks of people who messed up by executing the following in my cygwin home directory:
rm notes *
The space between notes and * was unintentional. Ah the fun.
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Ah yes, rm. My favourite moment was during my third year project, when I did “rm *java” instead of “rm *class”, though fortunately I had backups of most stuff.
I’ve used recovery tools in the past to reclaim deleted stuff. http://recover.sourceforge.net/ has both info and a recovery tool that should work on ext2 (and therefore ext3) filesystems, though I can’t remember if that’s the tool I used previously.
If you didn’t kill off everything directly after the rm operation, there’s a fair chance that the disk space has been used for something else, rendering any recovery tool useless, but the link might prove useful in future :)
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D’oh!
I’m so scared of this that I now have the following…
alias rm=”~/bin/saferm”
where saferm is the script
for file in $@ ; domv $file ~/.wastebasket/done
and have a cron job checking that folder nightly and deleting what’s in it. Saves any of the embarassing mistakes and doesn’t waste much disk space (not that that really matters).
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Hurrah! Always good to know I’m not the only one. :)
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I can’t believe there’s not a law that suggests that as time in unix increases, chances of losing work to rm increases exponentially. I know of no-one who hasn’t had at least a minor rm incident who uses unix systems a lot.
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