UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello all!

I ran rm -rf on a wrong directory, noticed it and hit ctrl-c.
Is there any way on a debian machine to tell what actually got deleted?

As there were many dirs and files in this directory that I don't care for, I'd like to see if anything important was removed.
Or do you know in what order rm removes stuff (e.g. does it remove files from the dir that is first in alphabet)?

Thanks for your consideration!
Thomas

You ran a recursive rm. This means it went down into the bottommost subdirectories alphabetically, deleted files, the went up a level, deleted files again, and so on.

Thanks for your answer - just to make sure i got it right:

Suppose I rm -fr data/ and there are these directories

data/alpha
data/alpha/x
data/alpha/y
data/beta
data/beta/aaa
data/beta/0

It would delete everthing in alpha/x first?

after some testing with rm -rfv I can only say, that it doesn't remove folders in any alphabetical order.
I can't see in which order rm progresses, but it does remove a given folder structure always in the same order.

Sorry to say but you have less than no chance of finding out what has gone! One of the problems of using rm -r is it is very destructive with no way back apart from a backup! Again sorry for the bad news.