[CJM]

well i was messing around in the terminal with my images dir and creating symbolic links to the photos in another location, and i somehow managed to trash the original folder with an rm command. about a gig of photos, nothing critical, but personal stuff i'd like to keep.

i only backup my documents and work folders so these images were never saved anywhere else. any chance of getting my stuff back??

[WJMoore]

Ahh bugger. Sounds like your're pretty much out of luck there. A 3rd party disk recovery tool may be able to help but only if the files don't get overwritten in the meantime.

WM

[CharlesS]

I'm sorry to say that your chances are very slim. However, there is a small chance that you may be able to recover the files, if you do this:

1. Shut the Mac down immediately. Do not start from the hard drive again until you are done with your attempt to recover the files.

2. Boot from a CD and use a file recovery program to try to recover the files. Unfortunately, at the present time, the only utility I know of which is able to do so is Norton UnErase, which in my experience usually doesn't do a very good job in completely recovering your files. It might be worth a try if you're desperate, as long as it comes on a bootable CD, which I'm not sure that it even does yet. There does seem to be something else called DataRecycler out now, but from its web site, it appears you need to have it already installed at the time you deleted the files.

If you really want to get your files back, you could take the drive to DriveSavers, and they would probably be able to help you. They're extremely expensive, though.

Moral of the story: be extremely careful with the rm command. Don't use the -r flag if you're only deleting files, and don't ever put a slash ('/') in a command line containing rm.

Charles

[C.J. Moof]

To hopefully someday prevent someone else from being in this awful position, I recommend aliasing rm to rm -i in the terminal. The format is

alias newcommand whattodo

From terminal, pico .tcsrch
enter on a line:
alias rm rm -i

control-x to save, answer yes.

This will supercede your existing rm command with the interactive version, which means before every file deletion it will ask "are you sure?" It can be tedious if you really have a truckload of stuff to rm, but that tedium probably would have saved CJM's pictures.

Unfortunatley, I don't have any way to undo the damage done. It did what it was told to.
==

If you want to keep an rm with no verification around:
alias nuke rm
in the .tcsrch file. Then just nuke filename to not have interactivity.... of course, now you have a backdoor on your safety mechanisim. It all comes down to the fact that unix will do what you say, not what you mean.

[chrisford]

From terminal, pico .tcsrch
enter on a line:
alias rm rm -i

Hi -

Idiot CLI question :

I misread and entered (in Terminal)

alias rm rm -i

on it's own. Will this be a permanent alias? If yes, what's the difference (if any!) between what I did, and what you suggested? If no, how un-permanent (!) is it?

Thanks for the advice.

[C.J. Moof]

That should last for that terminal session only. To make it work every time, stick it in the .tcsrch file.

BTW, I seem to be wrong about the alias nuke rm idea- nuke becomes a command, but it's interactive still. And I have a truckload of folders to delete that I made with a php script that didn't quite do what I expected.

There has to be a better way than changing the .tcsrch back to normal, logging out, in, doing things, change back, out, in....

[Chuckit]

Originally posted by C.J. Moof:
BTW, I seem to be wrong about the alias nuke rm idea- nuke becomes a command, but it's interactive still. And I have a truckload of folders to delete that I made with a php script that didn't quite do what I expected.

There has to be a better way than changing the .tcsrch back to normal, logging out, in, doing things, change back, out, in....

That's because "rm" has already been redefined as "rm -i" by the time you type it in. Try alias nuke /bin/rm. That way you bypass the alias and call the program directly.

Oh, also, you don't have to change .tcshrc and logout just to remove an alias for a session. Just unalias keyword.

[C.J. Moof]

Yep, that's it. The other trick was to just say rm -f, and that trumps the interactive switch.

[NeilCharter]

Can someone explain the benefit of making a symbolic link in the terminal over an alias in OS X GUI?

Neil

[Tsilou B.]

Originally posted by NeilCharter:
Can someone explain the benefit of making a symbolic link in the terminal over an alias in OS X GUI?

Neil

Symbolic links will work with UNIX applications that know nothing about Mac aliases. But symbolic links also have disadvantages. If you move a file or rename it, an alias will still find it at the new location or with the new name; a symbolic link will fail.

[mrmister]

The program that may be able to get your pics is Data Recycler X. It rocks, and I've saved things I *never* thought I'd see again with it.

Note that the less disk activitry has happened since the accident, the better your chances are for a good recovery.