UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I had a user run, by accident, the following line command on our UNIX server:

rm -f /usr/*

This apparently deleted some needed files on your system. Having very limited knowledge in UNIX, I thought I would ask the group if anyone knows how I can recover these file?

The version of UNIX is SCO_SV 3.2 2 i386

Anyone's help or thoughts would be much appreciated.

Thank Mike

there will be no way to get these files back... there is no rubbish bin in UNIX

gP

There is probably a lession to be learnt here.... Proper permissions set on the /usr directory and the files contained within it would stop a "user" from being able to delete the files within it.

If permissions were set correctly, and seeing as the "user" didn't specify a recursive delete, then the only output you'd get would be something like

Code:

$ rm -f /usr/*
rm: /usr/X11R6: is a directory
rm: /usr/bin: is a directory
rm: /usr/games: is a directory
rm: /usr/include: is a directory
rm: /usr/lib: is a directory
rm: /usr/local: is a directory
rm: /usr/man: Permission denied
rm: /usr/sbin: is a directory
rm: /usr/share: is a directory
rm: /usr/src: Permission denied

If the user had su'd to root, however, it'd be a different story, although rm still wouldn't recurse. If this is the case, I'd say it's time to review your policy on allowing users root access.

Depending on what's been deleted, you might have limited success pulling the files from your backup tapes (you do have backups, right?)

Cheers
ZB

ZB has a good point. I don't have access to a SCO box, but /usr on other systems seems to contain symlinks and subdirectories, no files per se. Any symlinks would've been clobbered, but these should be fairly easy to restore from backups or copy from a similiar system.