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What does rm -rf $HOME/.rvm* mean?

I ran it on my VPS server in Ubuntu Terminal by accident and now I'm having all sorts of problems with my ruby application. How can I undo it? Or what do I need to do to get back to the way things were, before I did it?

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    See man rm for info on what it did. * is a wildcard that matches any character any number of times, so .rvm* means all files/folders whose name begins with .rvm. What you should do? Reinstall your Ruby application (or restore from a recent backup).
    – Daniel Andersson
    Jul 22, 2013 at 20:00
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    You deleted all the rvm configuration files/directory for the user you were logged in as. Restore from backup, or re-install would be the common solutions.
    – ernie
    Jul 22, 2013 at 20:01
  • @ernie -Not sure what you mean by 'restore from back up'? Could you tell me how to do that? I did get on to my VPS hosting company and they could restore it only to the 18th July, if that's what you mean. I did the mistake on the 17th - only realised the cause of it today, when I discovered the .bash_history file.
    – CHarris
    Jul 22, 2013 at 21:10
  • @Daniel Andersson - cheers, I'll look into that. When you say 'reinstall your ruby application', do you mean reinstall rvm?
    – CHarris
    Jul 22, 2013 at 21:14
  • @ChristopheHarris if you weren't keeping backups, then there won't be any. Consider this a lesson learned. You'll likely have to reinstall RVM, and then re-apply any custom settings/configurations you had.
    – ernie
    Jul 22, 2013 at 21:42

2 Answers 2

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Restore the deleted files from your fine backups that you should be keeping.

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  • where would I find the 'fine back ups'? My hosting company said they keep records only as far as the previous week, which is too late for me.
    – CHarris
    Jul 22, 2013 at 21:12
  • Lessons are best learned the hard way. Firstly, don't run commands if you don't know what they do..seriously wtf? And second, have a backup strategy.
    – Scandalist
    Jul 28, 2013 at 1:30
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It is good practice to keep your application configuration in the project so assuming you have such files you should be able to rebuild environment from it:

  1. install rvm again: \curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable
  2. load rvm into shell: source ~/.rvm/scripts/rvm
  3. find the project directory, and cd to it: cd ~/apps/my_app
  4. try to install and use ruby from the project: rvm use --install --create .
  5. try to install gems from the project: bundle install

For the 4th step there should be most likely file called .rvmrc or .ruby-version but rvm can even try to detect ruby from Gemfile

For the 5th step most ruby applications use Gemfile to manage your gem dependencies.

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