UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Help!
I was trying to rename multiple files. Like in DOS, i decided to use wildcards and now i am missing some files. Any ideas on how to recover them? Or find out where the files went?

I had these 3 files
resume1.log
elecresume.log
compresume.log

The command I ran was
mv *.log *.log.bak

Now elecresume.log is missing but nothing happened to the other two files. Also no new files got created i.e., the *.log.bak files.

Thanks in advance.

mv works on 1 target at a time.

you cant specify multiple files unless you are moveing them to a directory.

on my solaris 8 box. i get the following:

Code:

$ ls *.log
1.log  2.log  3.log
$ mv *.log *.log.bak
mv: *.log.bak not found
$ ls
1.log  2.log  3.log

If those are the only 3 files ending in .log in your directory, you could do this:

for i in `ls *.log`;do
mv $i $i.bak
done

That would do each one individually but loop through the 3 files so you only have to do the one command.

I understand that now. But I am trying to find out what happened to the one log file that is now missing. Is there any way to find out where it went? Most importantly, can it be recovered?

you cant get it back unless you restore it from backup.

you shouldnt have lost the file in the first place the command should have failed per my example.

mabey your os's mv command acts differntly then mine.

my os: sol8 on sparc

i am using FreeBSD. but yeah looks like that file is gone forever.
Thank you all for the information you provided.

Maybe before you completely give up, you could try searching for the files since maybe your "mv" command is doing something unusual instead of displaying an error. But like Optimus, my system displays an error too.

find / -name "elecresume*" -print

find / -name "*.log.bak" -print