[KLUG Members] help for longtime (but novice) user who finally managed to misuse rm...?

[Bruce Smith]

> I just typed '\rm -rf *' on my home directory, thinking I was in a
> different directory, and it was a few seconds before I noticed my
> mistake and hit ^C.

What direct were you in?  The root directory (/), or elsewhere?

> My "key" files are triply backed up all the time, and other less
> important stuff is backed up monthly (or so), but I also have a /lot/ of
> files in my home directory I don't back up at all--my mp3's of all my
> CD's, for example.
> 
> I don't expect there's a whole lot anyone can do for me, but if you have
> any helpful advice I could could use it.  Perhaps most importantly:  is
> there any clever way to figure out exactly what managed to get erased?

Depends where you did the rm command.  If system files were located
there, you can use "rpm" to verify your installation.

> I'm using RH 8.0--old I know, but it /is/ ext3.  I don't know much about
> journaling, but I'm trying to learn fast!  I tried 'logdump /dev/hdb3'
> as root and got this error:
> 
> <logdump typeout>
> Incorrectly built binary which accesses errno, h_errno or _res directly.
> Needs to be fixed.
> logdump version 1.0.17, 02-Apr-2002
> Device Name: /dev/hdb3
> JFS_LOGDUMP:couldn't read log superblock:failure in (null)
> </logdump typeout>
> 
> Unfortunately, this makes no sense to me.  A file gets created that just 
> says basically the same thing.

I don't know about logdump, but maybe it's a jfs only command?
You need to run the ext2/3 commands on an ext3 partition.

 - BS