Search code examples
linuxshellunixcommand-linemv

Is it possible to somehow undo the results of the mv command?

Here's the problem. I had a bunch of files in a directory. Then I created another directory in that directory. Then I cobbled together this command:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec mv {} ./1 \;

This command was supposed to take all the files in the directory and move them to that newly-created directory, but instead of providing the name of the directory, I screwed up and typed 1, as you can see from the code snippet. So, I ended up having just one text file named 1 that now contains the stuff from one of the disappeared files and that's all.

Is there any chance I could recover the lost files (or possibly the actual data from the files--they were all text files) or are they pretty much permanently gone?

Before:

misha@hp-laptop:~/Documents/prgmg/work$ ls
add.s  bubble.s  cpuid.s  div.s    hello.s  mult.s       sum.s   test.s
a.out  c         demo.s   gas.txt  max.s    print_arr.s  test.c
misha@hp-laptop:~/Documents/prgmg/work$ mkdir asm

After:

misha@hp-laptop:~/Documents/prgmg/work$ ls
1  asm  c

So, as you can see, I wanted to put all assembly language files into the asm directory. And as things stand now, 1 is a text file and it contains the stuff from gas.txt.

Solution

  • No. Not easily. Sorry.

    Restoring from backup would be the best option.

    See the answers to the question "Recovering accidentally deleted files" over at Unix & Linux, if you feel like doing a bit of low-level file access.