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

[Danny Cox]

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