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

[Dow Hurst]

Nathan,
A good practice for "rm" or when operating as root is to use full paths 
for your commands instead of relative paths.  Not that this helps now!  
But, I've had to develop the habit after getting bit.

Wherever you are in the filesystem, typing /usr/bin/rm -rf 
/home/backup/* would have prevented the mishap.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Dow


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 --\/
>
>