I'll add my $.02 to the "I don't have any suggestions to you for recovering your data, but here's what I do to prevent me from shooting myself in the foot" discussion.... I use the fact that, in bash, "!$" means "whatever was the last argument on the previous command. So, if I want to get rid of a bunch of files, I typically do: $ ls *~ <list of a bunch of files pops out here> $ rm !$ Incidentally, this also prevents the mistake of accidentally putting a space between the "*" and the "~" :-) In your case, where you wanted to get rid of ./mydir, I would have done: $ ls -d ./mydir $ rm -rf !$ --wpd
