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

[Aditya Srinivasan]

Hi Nathan,

This is my guess based on general principles. I dont know if there is a 
special rule involved here. 

I would imagine that all rm did was to use the list provided by the shell 
after it expanded * (since you used rm -fr *).

So look at the sequence of files/directories provided by the shell when it 
expands * in /home
eg  echo *
If /home/backup is the first dir .. then you should be safe.

Thanks,
sriad


On Wed, 24 Nov 2004, Nathan J. Underwood wrote:

> 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 --\/
> 
> 
> 

-- 
Thanks,
sriad