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Can anyone tell me how I can undo a sudo rm -r /var/run mistake?

I can't use sftp and mysql now.

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@BlueNovember: I'd edited that over on stackoverflow ( stackoverflow.com/questions/1988866/… ).. , deleted here before noticing your question .. sorry for breaking the context. I figured the people on serverfault were most likely to have been in this "pit of doom" situation. – lexu Jan 1 '10 at 15:41
Ah, hence the confusion. Comment removed. =) – RJFalconer Jan 1 '10 at 15:53
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Jan 1 '10 at 15:30

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3 Answers

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You can... reinstall debian!

There's a reason you should be careful with anything starting with "sudo rm", and this is it :P

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sudo rm -r, actually. – Malfist Jan 1 '10 at 16:00
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-f especially, but when you're deleting ANYTHING as root you should be bloody careful :P – Phoshi Jan 1 '10 at 16:13
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You can always reinstall, but I personally would go to a lot of drudge work to avoid it... – dmckee Jan 1 '10 at 17:31
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You can fix things like this by reinstalling, but you can also dive in and try and put it all back together. You'll learn alot more about your system that way, and be motivated never to ever make that mistake again. – Adam Luchjenbroers Jan 2 '10 at 0:34
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up vote 7 down vote

reinstalling debian is not necessary. in /var/run are stored temporary pid files.. just try if restart of broken services works, if not, do dpkg -S /var/run to see, which packages installed some subdirectories there (dpkg -L <PACKAGENAME> | grep /var/run), eventually you might want to try dpkg-reconfigure <PACKAGENAME>. then restart services (/etc/init.d/... restart) or entire debian.

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See now, this is what happens when you know how your package manager works... – dmckee Jan 1 '10 at 17:30
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up vote 0 down vote 
sudo mkdir /var/run

If something complains about a subdirectory missing, create it in the same way. But packages are supposed to be robust against that now, because /var/run can be on a temporary file system. Worst case, reinstall the package in question.

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