I thing I logged su user and did
$pwd was 1 folder...
I didnt think that it would be /root
I needed $pwd/*/* something like this

is thre any help to get it back? I'm on live CD atm.

Kuduntu 8.04.1 KDE 4.1

help help help

- thank you -

Please It's Urgent !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

Hi.

what was the command supposed to do? Move something to the present working directory, is my guess, but what? everything or only the lowest directory?

I wonder if you could provide some info on your install.

What was the $PWD?

Can you tell me, what is the installed OS(on the HD)?

Did you do it while running the live cd, or is that a fall-back boot?

you could recover the moved files,

either

by date stamp, using ls or du commands (look these up, with man or --help) and even konqueror from a gui.

or If you're prepared to wait, a recovery application, like testdisk and photorec, all you need is a free partition of equal size to the partition being recovered. (this could take a while, depending on the size of the disk and speed of hardware etc.)


I hope this gives you something to work on,

regards, Glenn

Ouch!.. that's a nasty one.

mv /*/*/ $pwd will have moved every second-level directory to one big dumping ground $pwd.
Even ignoring any name collisions (/usr/lib/ , /var/lib/ & /opt/lib will have all been dumped to $pwd/lib and intermixed as an example) you're looking at a pretty big mess and it'll be next to impossible to sort it out.

I'm afraid you're most likely looking at a reinstall/restore from backup.

thanks... if only i would do $pwd/*/*/

lol!

Sorry, I know this is serious, and I wish it could be easily reversed too.

any other info?

Glenn

<edit>
A lesson can be learned from this. Always set up a /home dir on itial(first) install.
That way you can do an easy clean install without having to format the partition that has /home on it.

During installing mandriva, the installer will want to format /root and /usr as a bare minimum.

I have separate partitions for others too, like /var, /var/ftp, /var/www, /boot, /local (local storage) etcetera, because I install and re-install fairly regularly, but not as much as I used too.

Anyhow, I hope you sort it out.

Cheers, Glenn

I'm looking at that command I still don't understand how it does what it did.

I don't feel so bad for carefully combing over every detail of tape backing up before executing any actual commands now.

/*/*/ means every second level directory... oh yeah, I see now.

Ouch. Sounds like you're screwed as far as recovering the mess you've created to a working system is concerned. Assuming you are not willing to simply loose all your files I think your best bet is to get hold of a suitably large external harddisk, copy everything on to that, re-install your system then try and go through the files on the external harddisk and find anything you want to keep. Or get a new harddisk, swap it for you current one, install on that and put your current harddisk in an external case so you can look at the files on it.

What was that command supposed to do anyway? What was $pwd supposed to represent? Current working directory is $PWD but I've never seen that used in a mv or cp command because . does the same thing and is much quicker to type.

Apparently not urgent enough to respond to everyone's questions.......

Note that the first post says he is on live CD---that means the files and folders in question may have been just in RAM.

I read that as "since I borked my system I loaded a live CD so I could get to the net and ask for help"

I think he means he's getting here by a Live CD...

IGF

That's the way I took it too.

Yep, it looks like a real mess.

Testdisks photorec can recover it though.

Maybe it was urgent because of battery power,

I'm curious, why did you run this command? I'm not sure if /home on a separate partition is the answer(although good advice). I've never ever put home on a separate partition, and have never had a problem. I think the more important thing here is, when you run terminal commands that you know are going to be moving directories, changing their permissions or structure, etc.. make ABSOLUTE SURE, you're running the command right.

IGF