At 9:03 AM -0700 8/6/06, Richard England wrote:
>Eric Donkersloot wrote:
>> On Sun, 2006-08-06 at 10:49 -0400, Croombe F. Pensom wrote:
>>
>>> .... I was advised to do something
>>> which turned out to be disastrous so NEVER EVER issue the following from
>>> a root shell
>>>
>>> rm -rf $Home/*
>>>
>>
>> Are you sure you executed the command above ? This would mean you
>> deleted the /root directory and all its contents. Are you sure you
>> didn't delete your personal home dir and everything in it ?
>> Anyway, I guess you've learned your lesson, don't just copy and execute
>> commands (especially rm commands) from a root shell.
>>
>>
>>> As I found to my bitter cost, this ERASED EVERYTHING including my data
>>> files on my USB memory stick and these were my day-to-day operating
>>> needs such as : e-mail addresses, snail-mail addresses and phone numbers
>>> etc., Firefox bookmarks, financial records and so on. I was DEVASTATED
>>> to say the least. Now, following a complete re-install of FC5 I'm glad
>>> to say I'm back in business and slowly recovering about 90% of my data
>>> from old files saved to Zip disk.
>>>
>>> Croombe Pensom
>>>
>>>
>>>
>I think I would have learned to stay far away from the individual who
>gave me the recommendation to use rm -rf $HOME/*
>
>He may have thought it was a joke but people like that should not be
>allowed to frequent public gatherings or communicate with anyone without
>adult supervision. They are twisted, immature individuals.
They may also have actually said to do something slightly different:
rm -rf $HOME/.*
That would get all the .configuration files, even for other applications.
I'd have suggested trying a new user first, and it that worked, mv'd the
dot files out of the way.
There are many things that can destroy all one's files. One always needs
backups.
For a safer command to see what's up, try:
ls -d $HOME/.*
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' <http://www.georgeanelson.com/>
