[ale] help with rm (yes, I'm embarrassed about this)
Danny Cox
danscox at mindspring.com
Sat Nov 27 20:00:48 EST 2004
Nathan,
On Wed, 2004-11-24 at 09:15, 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.
Since your command was 'rm -fr *', then the files are in sorted order,
depending on what your LANG (and perhaps other environment vars) are set
to. You can see what 'echo *' does to the same effect.
This would be a good time to lock the barn door now that the horses are
gone, and script that command so it doesn't bite you any more.
--
kernel, n.: A part of an operating system that preserves the
medieval traditions of sorcery and black art.
Danny
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