Linux @lemmy.ml Joël de Bruijn @lemmy.ml 4w ago

Made a big(?) mistake with `mv ///* ./`

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

35 comments

If you ran this as a non-root user then you didn't move any system files you just made some copies. Delete the new copies and you should be fine.
- Got chills down my spine initially but was a "good" scare .... the one which makes me carefull next time before any real damage is done. 🙈👍
  
  Good thing everything is now fine. For the next time You use 'mv' or 'cp' or 'rm' and so on, replace this with ls to see what files abd folders You are about to move, remove, copy
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 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.
I'd probably do a clean install (eventually) even if it looked like stuff works for now.

I know the pain, though. did rm -rf in the wrong directory and wiped half my drive in seconds. Good times.
- Classic. I also did the rm -rf once in a wrong directory of a programming project. Luckily it was a subdirectory, so nothing important lost. But it could have easily if I was one hierarchy higher.
  
  I am so much afraid of rm -rf, that I usually go in a directory with cd and rm in current directory those files only. And then I do rmdir on empty directories. I use recursive -r only, with specific directory names included (autocomplete helps). This way, even if I am in the wrong directory, the chance that there is the exact same directory name is a bit lower.
  
  And I often also just switch to graphical filemanager to delete files. Not only that. Sometimes I also just move folder instead deleting, so I have a back up until I'm sure. There is also trash-cli.
- Ouuuuch 😬
I took a deep breath (was not being root, how bad could it be?) and rebooted. Luckily everything seemed fine.

Grub letting me choose between Debian and Win11 (its a laptop from my employer) and both booted if choosen. Thanks for all the advice.
If ./ and ./*/*/* are both within your home folder, you should just restore it from your backup. The command you ran takes everything up to 3 levels deep and moves it up to the working directory, and unraveling that will be a pain in the ass.
- If the actual command was this .... mv /*/*/* ./ would moving stuff out of /boot or /dev folders make more sense?
  
  I can't say because those paths are relative and I don't know your file structure. That said, even if I did, restoring from backup would take out all of the guesswork here so I would recommend that over trying to do it manually.
  
  Strange thing is, instead of moving folders (which isnt possible without root anyway) it looked like some of them got copied instead. Compared some folders from /boot/grub with the dump in my homefolder and they were the same files (number and names etc).
I think there is a typo in the path in the body of your post, or?
- Yeah, I see, command wildcard asterix being markdown bold. Original command:
  
  You moved everything down 3 dirs from root to your working dir.
  
  Use backtics to quote code fragments. Tripple backtics to block quote. You should be able to edit your post.
  
  What you have in title of the post, body of the post and in this screenshot all disagree with each other.
If you did it as root probably broken, if not it should be ok, you might just get programs behaving weirdly.
- Ah, I was no root .... that should lower the impact ...
  
  It looks like you grabbed stuff from /dev which I think can't be moved, it's created and managed by the kernel
Unless you ran the command as root, on a standard install it should really only be able to touch your home directory and any disks you may have had user mounted under /media.

35 comments

Made a big(?) mistake with mv /*/*/* ./

Made a big(?) mistake with `mv ///* ./`