rename issue with file /folder

tanveer · 05-16-2014, 11:26 PM

Hi all,

the other day one of my friend asked me a question that he accidentally renamed a folder in ubuntu in /var/log and then later couldnt remember what was the original folder name before change. He did it from GUI.
Never had this issue but also couldn't answer too. Anyone know how: any easy way?
Thanks in advance.

Ygrex · 05-17-2014, 01:30 AM

under hypnosis people tend to remember a lot of things accidentally

Ygrex · 05-17-2014, 01:34 AM

probably RPM should help you: each directory under /var/log should belong to some installed RPM, to find out the original name you can perform a file system integrity check with RPM

Ygrex · 05-17-2014, 01:35 AM

sorry, you are writing about Ubuntu (RHEL in your profile), then dpkg

JeremyBoden · 05-18-2014, 05:08 PM

Quote:

the other day one of my friend asked me a question that he accidentally renamed a folder in ubuntu in /var/log and then later couldnt remember what was the original folder name before change. He did it from GUI.

If this is true, then it seems that he had /var/log open in nautilus as root.
In general, its a very bad idea to run a GUI as root.

Chances are that it should fix itself. You could check the contents of the files in

Code:

/etc/logrotate.d

against /var/log/. This should cover the non-empty directories in /var/log. Personally, I wouldn't bother since it is likely that the directories & files will get automatically recreated.

GNU/Linux · 05-19-2014, 05:44 AM

You can do

Code:

$ ls -ltr /var/log

and see the files at the bottom... But then again, system continuously write to files in that directory.