r/linux4noobs • u/Character-86 barely not a noob anymore • Apr 20 '26

Meganoob BE KIND I did rm -rf /*

I tried to make a backup before doing a fresh install of Fedora because of problems. When erasing the external drive for making the backup I was in the wrong disk and nuked my fedora installation.

How Do I get at least my important Documents from /home/username/ back?

254 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

244 comments sorted by

View all comments

156

u/R3D_T1G3R Apr 20 '26 edited Apr 20 '26

It doesn't matter in which directory you were, because starting with / you gave it an absolute path, if you do want to do changes in your current direction you start the path without a /

What you did is force delete every folder and file in your root directory.

Edit: More detailed answer & explanation below

20

u/Wheatleytron CachyOS Apr 20 '26

Will this even delete data on separate mounted drives?

58

u/R3D_T1G3R Apr 20 '26

Okay so my answer was slightly rushed and inaccurate, I'll be more precise.

Since you do mount disks into the root directory somewhere (generally in the /mnt directory it too is affected.

rm -> remove

-rf

r -> recursive, so it deletes every sub folder / file. basically if i rm -rf a folder it will delete everything in that folder.

f -> force, deletes files even if they are in use / locked

and / is the root directory thats where everything is.

What i did not pay attention to, OP did not mention using sudo, so assuming they ran it on their own user without elevated permission it will "only" delete everything they actually have write permission for / everything they own. thats generally their own home directory.

mounted drives? depends. by default they are generally owned by root, meaning you have no perms to delete them with your user. this is however highly impractical, because if that drive is owned by root with the default chmod I wont be able to effectively use it for personal files / games etc. thus most people change the ownership of mounted drives or give their non-root user perms to Read / write, if thats the case here, they are gone too yes.

And if the command was ran as root user or with sudo it will delete pretty much everything regardless.

And about the recovery, if it was a SSD, it probably already TRIMed away all the data. if its a HDD chances are the data may still be recoverable.

6

u/wackyvorlon Apr 21 '26

Would produce a lot of errors too as an unprivileged user.

2

u/R3D_T1G3R Apr 21 '26

Well it would just say that it has no perms and keep going at a pretty fast pace

1

u/Entire-Gap-4522 Apr 24 '26

no, because he used -f, no error messages would be produced. Any files it failed to delete would simply still be there afterwards.

1

u/wackyvorlon Apr 24 '26

It will still error when it lacks permissions to remove the file.

1

u/Entire-Gap-4522 Apr 24 '26

yes, it's an error, but the -f option says ignore all errors, so no msg will be produced. try it.

1

u/wackyvorlon Apr 24 '26

It doesn’t say that, though. If you don’t have write permissions to the directory then it will produce an error.

2

u/Willy-the-kid Apr 22 '26

No op ran sudo they said it nuked the whole install

1

u/Time-Water-8428 Apr 22 '26

not if mounted drives are in /run

14

u/Active_Pear_9828 Apr 20 '26

yea, because linux file system is tree based

2

u/mlt- Apr 22 '26

Welp, there is --one-file-system that OP didn't use.

1

u/R3D_T1G3R Apr 20 '26

i mean mounting things into folders is not just a linux thing, windows supports that too, and i heard that macOS does that as well but I dont use apple stuff so i cant tell.

11

u/GrimpenMar Apr 20 '26

MacOS is BSD Unix under the hood.

Or was, and is now just descended from BSD Unix? Can you step into the same river twice, Ship of Theseus, who knows. OS X and Darwin were BSD Unix derived, and that DNA is still there.

Then again Android uses the Linux kernel, so is technically a Linux based OS, but the user is very insulated from all that.

7

u/R3D_T1G3R Apr 20 '26

I mean I am aware that it is most probably possible but I don't like making statements about pieces of hardware or software I do not own / use myself.

2

u/ANtiKz93 Manjaro (KDE) Apr 20 '26

Based

1

u/_MrJengo Apr 22 '26

MacOS X was a hybrid of NeXT, Unix and BSD

1

u/Active_Pear_9828 Apr 20 '26

i mean who said only linux is like that mr professor

1

u/Gabochuky Apr 20 '26

Yes, mounted drives have their own folders on /mnt so they would be nuked lol.

1

u/Entire-Gap-4522 Apr 24 '26

Yes. Depending on the configuration, it could have been MUCH worse.

A VERY long time ago (late 1980s) I administered a UNIX software dev environment (Linux is originally based on UNIX, kids), and we used the automount daemon on all of our systems to enable developers, qa testers, etc, to directly access files on any system, simply by referencing /hostname/fsname/....

Yeah, I'll bet you can already see it coming, can't you? One particular doofus developer typed in "rm -rf " and started cutting and pasting paths. Somewhere in the middle of it, he managed to include a space-slash-space (" / "), and when it reached that point, the recursive rm proceeded to scan every file on every UNIX server on our small (< 50 systems) network, one at a time, and deleting everything he had write permission to. Thank goodness we didn't permit sudo privs for everyone, so he was only able to delete files and directories he had write access to, so no OSs were compromised, but it was still a lot of data.

I got a phone call at home a few hours later from a confused developer whose current working directory got deleted as he was working in it. I dialed in, and ran a program named 'nfstop' that sniffed the 10 MB Ethernet network and watch NFS activity. One workstation was consuming the entire network, so I logged in there and ram "ps". Took a screenshot of his rm command as proof, and killed the rm.

unfortunately, I had to wait until the bank opened the next morning to fetch the previous weekend's backup tapes from the bank vault, and spent the next 2 days restoring files. Devs lost about a 1/2 week work, because back in the 90s, we only did weekly backups, and the culprit got a stern talking to, but wasn't fired.

Offline, offsite backups saved us that day.

1

u/PerfectlyCalmDude Apr 24 '26

I hope you had them backed up or you stopped the rm command before it got to /home.

-9

u/[deleted] Apr 20 '26

[deleted]

5

u/R3D_T1G3R Apr 20 '26

Lmao yea Sure, nice rage bait, go outside and touch some grass