Background:
I think I messed up …
Wanted to get a lot of files out of a nested folderstructure 3 levels deep and used mv /*/*/* ./ somewhere deep in my personal folders.
I got a lot of errors and quick as I could stopped it.
Now that folder is is messed up with a lot of stuff (see below) which I dont know the origin of.
The good news: I have fairly recent backups
Questions:
- Could they be from subdirectories in my home folder?
- Could they be from subdirectories outside my home folder? Especially grubenv caught my eye.
- Could it be potentially dangerous to reboot? I leave my PC on untill I know more.
- Would it be possible to reverse the moving in some way, to put them back where they belong, even manually?
Any help greatly appreciated.
Files:
Sorry for the long list
0 1 10 10:1 10:125 10:126 10:127 10:130 10:183 10:224 10:228 10:229 10:231 … 116:8 116:9 … 13:81 … 8 81:0 81:1 81:2 81:3 9 arch_status attr autogroup by-diskseq by-id by-label by-partlabel by-partuuid by-path by-uuid cgroup cmdline comm coredump_filter cpu_resctrl_groups cpuset fd fdinfo fonts gid_map grubenv limits list.txt locale loginuid map_files maps mountinfo mounts net ns numa_maps nvme0n1p8_crypt oom_adj oom_score oom_score_adj projid_map sched schedstat sessionid setgroups smaps smaps_rollup stat statm status task timens_offsets timers timerslack_ns uid_map unicode.pf2 usb wchan x86_64-efi
Mark it as an achievement on your learning path and move on. We all did something silly like that at some point.
Great that you have backups, get a fresh install and restore it.
Lessons learned: don’t work as root unless you absolutely positively have a good reason to do so.
I have the habit of holding shift everytime I delete something, one day I’ll learn the hard way not to do it
I only have a backup of my own personal files, not of the whole system. So my question about impact is about not having to do a fresh install.
Also I have dual boot and grub etc do scare me. 😁
I didnt work as root by the way …
I always treat the system as discardable and only backup the /home and /etc directories. Saving those, I can afford to wipe the system and re-settle on a new distro if I want to.
Of course if you throw Windows into the mix, all bets are off. Personally, I stay the hell away from that.
Yeah agree, its a work provided laptop, they allowed local admin etc but require Windows (at least that is) so just glad they gave me a HP laptop with 500GB SSD and for me certain freedom to configure dual boot etc