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Possible Duplicate:
undo Linux's rm?

is it possible to undo a rm somefile command in linux?

and if so, how does one do that?

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The classic beginner's trap. – thosewhatnots Nov 16 '10 at 14:00
What is you OS? FS? – osgx Nov 16 '10 at 14:10

migrated from stackoverflow.com Nov 16 '10 at 14:03

marked as duplicate by Sathya♦, grawity, Diago Nov 17 '10 at 7:01

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5 Answers

up vote 11 down vote

rm doesn't move the file to some trash directory, it deletes it. Thus you cannot, in normal ways.

You could try with some tool to find removed files on the filesystem. If you want to try I suggest you to immediately unmount your filesystem and not mount it (in readwrite) until you found back your files or until you give up.

If you're scared of removing files, you should replace your rm command with another one that asks confirmation before permanently remove files. You can use an alias to this purpose:

alias rm="rm -i"
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Or replace it with a command that moves them to a .trash folder instead of deleting them. – gkrogers Nov 16 '10 at 16:46
up vote 3 down vote

Here is a good article

http://www.xs4all.nl/~carlo17/howto/undelete_ext3.html

The most frequently quoted passage comes from the ext3 FAQ itself:

Q: How can I recover (undelete) deleted files from my ext3 partition?

Actually, you can't! This is what one of the developers, Andreas Dilger, said about it:

In order to ensure that ext3 can safely resume an unlink after a crash, it actually zeros out the block pointers in the inode, whereas ext2 just marks these blocks as unused in the block bitmaps and marks the inode as "deleted" and leaves the block pointers alone.

Your only hope is to "grep" for parts of your files that have been deleted and hope for the best.

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That would be interesting to grep the filesystem device for parts of the file. Might actually work, at least in part. – David Nov 16 '10 at 14:05
@David, the article linked is about ext3grep – osgx Nov 16 '10 at 14:10
up vote 2 down vote

Not normally, no - it's been deleted, and there isn't normally an undelete comand. It's for that reason that the very first thing that my first Software Engineering professor told the class to do was to redefine the rm command to mv (move) the file(s) to a .trash folder.

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up vote 1 down vote

You might want to try creating a recycle bin. Here's instructions using SAMBA in a Ubuntu server: http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p=1252880&postcount=7

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up vote 0 down vote

It might be possible, but more details are needed, at first limit you operations on that filesystem.

Please give your operating system name, kernel (uname -a), mount points (mount) and path of the file.

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