Re: undo rm -rf *

[Celik <celik.n.00@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 4:38 AM, Bill Oliver <vendor@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I'm not a fan of trash directories.  They give you a second chance, but
you may end up not really deleting things you wanted to delete.  What
about a simple script something like this?  This is off the top of my
head and not tested (so certainly has a bug or two), but it seems that
you could check with something like this:

#!/bin/sh

echo "check?"

read ANS

if [ $ANS = "y" ]

then

        ls -laR $1 | more

        echo "continue?"

        read ANS2

        if [ $ANS2 = "y" ]

        then

                rm -fr $1

        fi
else

        rm -fr $1

fi

Yes that script will do to prevent accidental deletions in the future. Modified it slightly and posting it just in case needed by someone else. Thank you :)

#!/bin/bash

echo -e "prompt-bf-deletion.sh...\n"

rm_target=$1

echo "+++Content(s) to be deleted:"
ls -laR $rm_target | more


echo -e "\n+++Continue with deletion (y/n)?"

read ANS

if [ $ANS = "y" ]; then

    rm -fr $rm_target
    echo -e "Contents deleted...\n"
else
    echo -e "Exiting without deletion...\n"

fi

exit




 

Of course there are two problems with big deletions.  If you use more, it would get boring hitting the space bar a zillion times, and if you don't, then you won't see the files...

billo


On Wed, 27 Mar 2013, Celik wrote:

On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 1:14 AM, Bruno Wolff III <bruno@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
      On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 22:23:29 +1100,
        Celik <celik.n.00@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
            Hi,

            Had a logic error in my bash script and did "rm -rf *" on my current
            working directory. Any tips for undoing such an error?


I've done worse. I once did rm -rf .* to try to remove some config files in a home directory. I forgot that .*
matched .. and deleted a lot of stuff I didn't want to.


Bruno, after such an experience, did you come up with an alternative solution to using "rm -rf"?
"rm -i" is good as it prompts before deletion however it becomes tedious if there are a lot of files to be deleted,
hence "rm -rf" seems ideal but dangerous if not cautious :(
Had a look on google, there was one particular recommendation that caught me attention (sorry I don't have the link). It
was recommended to mv the files (and/or folders) to be deleted into a tmp directory. I'm planning to try that in my
future code, we'll see how things go.

Regards,
C

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