[ale] help with rm (yes, I'm embarrassed about this)

[Nathan J. Underwood]

Ok, too early in the morning, and little coffee has been ingested (and 
it's really close to a long weekend).  Anyway, here's the deal.  I have 
a server that houses all of it's data in /home.  There's a subdirectory 
(/home/backups) that had a backup of all of the stuff that was in /home 
(all of the data) that I needed to empty (not delete the directory, just 
empty it out).  Generally, I'll cd into that directory and do an rm -rf 
*, which works really well.  Since the process is a once-in-a-blue-moon 
thing, I've not bothered scripting or automating it.  At any rate, I had 
to do it this morning.  Unfortunately for me, I was in /home, rather 
than in /home/backup.  I very quickly realized what I'd done (about 2 
seconds), but had already started the command.  So, here's the quandry. 
  I know *some stuff* must have been deleted.  I'm hoping that it starts 
deleting at 0 and progresses to z.  If that's the case, it would have 
started in the /home/backups directory, in which case I have nothing to 
worry about (i.e. nothing outside of /home/backups would have been 
bothered).  Can anyone confirm / debunk this, or tell me where to look 
it up?  Thanks.

\/-- insert flames here --\/


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registered linux user # 73046