undo rm -rf *

[Bill Oliver]

I'm not a fan of trash directories.  They give you a second chance, but
you may end up not really deleting things you wanted to delete.  What
about a simple script something like this?  This is off the top of my
head and not tested (so certainly has a bug or two), but it seems that
you could check with something like this:

#!/bin/sh

echo "check?"

read ANS

if [ $ANS = "y" ]

then

         ls -laR $1 | more

         echo "continue?"

         read ANS2

         if [ $ANS2 = "y" ]

         then

                 rm -fr $1

         fi
else

         rm -fr $1

fi

Of course there are two problems with big deletions.  If you use more, it would get boring hitting the space bar a zillion times, and if you don't, then you won't see the files...

billo


On Wed, 27 Mar 2013, Celik wrote:

> 
> 
> On Wed, Mar 27, 2013 at 1:14 AM, Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to> wrote:
>       On Tue, Mar 26, 2013 at 22:23:29 +1100,
>         Celik <celik.n.00 at gmail.com> wrote:
>             Hi,
>
>             Had a logic error in my bash script and did "rm -rf *" on my current
>             working directory. Any tips for undoing such an error?
> 
> 
> I've done worse. I once did rm -rf .* to try to remove some config files in a home directory. I forgot that .*
> matched .. and deleted a lot of stuff I didn't want to.
> 
> 
> Bruno, after such an experience, did you come up with an alternative solution to using "rm -rf"?
> "rm -i" is good as it prompts before deletion however it becomes tedious if there are a lot of files to be deleted,
> hence "rm -rf" seems ideal but dangerous if not cautious :(
> Had a look on google, there was one particular recommendation that caught me attention (sorry I don't have the link). It
> was recommended to mv the files (and/or folders) to be deleted into a tmp directory. I'm planning to try that in my
> future code, we'll see how things go.
> 
> Regards,
> C
> 
>