[ale] Speaking of RM -RF SLASH...

[Aaron Ruscetta]

I just had a Young Friend (one of the teens in the youth
group I organize) who is delving into PC building and
Linux call me in a panic.

Not sure exactly what he was trying to do or why yet,
but he says he issued a sudo rm -rf command on /private
and everything stopped working.  Not sure exactly what
he's blown away, but it probably included his shadow
file.  On my mac here, /private contains the actual etc
directory and /etc is just a soft link.

We're going to work on salvaging his system tomorrow.
Any suggestions for maybe recovering reconstructing
the deleted directory? (no new writes have taken place...)
or recommendations on easy process for reinstalling to
a new hard disk and transferring system and user files?

I think he was running Ubuntu 11.10.  Can anybody
give me a listing of what Ubuntu puts in /private these
days?

peace
aaron