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
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.
Just a quick clarification:
/*/*/*is not a relative path. The first/references the root directory.You’re right. I thought it was
./*/*/*instead.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).