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

[John Anderson]

On 02/10/2012 11:52 PM, Aaron Ruscetta wrote:
> 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
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I don't know the answer, but I am curious if anyone knows a way to 
recover from a bad rm.
I am running mint(which is an ubuntu derivative) and I seem to have an 
active /etc and no /private.