Path: utzoo!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!mcsun!ukc!slxsys!ibmpcug!dylan
From: dylan@ibmpcug.co.uk (Matthew Farwell)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Re: daft way to undo rm
Message-ID: <1991Jun13.023922.26166@ibmpcug.co.uk>
Date: 13 Jun 91 02:36:29 GMT
References: <1991Jun12.231044.14542@spider.co.uk>
Sender: dylan@ibmpcug.co.uk (Matthew Farwell)
Reply-To: dylan@ibmpcug.CO.UK (Matthew Farwell)
Organization: The IBM PC User Group, UK.
Lines: 34
Approved: dylan@ibmpcug.co.uk (The monster at the bottom of the sea)

In article <1991Jun12.231044.14542@spider.co.uk> mark@spider.co.uk (Mark Valentine) writes:
>After spending a few hours typing in a fairly lengthy shell script, my brain
>decided I'd better rm it immediately (you know the evil way these minds work).
>
>I happened to be using rlogin from within Oliver Laumann's "screen" utility
>at the time, so I su'd, typed "less /dev/disk", used "/" to search for a few
>remembered variable names, and checked on its progress every now and then.
>When I saw a block on the free list I recognised, I used the screen-dump key
>to save it to local host's disk.  By the end of the afternoon (after just two
>or three passes) I was able to do a simple cat and edit and found myself only
>a few bytes short.

I did this sort of thing too.  I was using a package under DOS (I'll
forget the name to protect the guilty), that had the concept of volumes
on the disk.  Each volume had a load of files underneath that volume
(sort of like a directory but more primitive).  Filenames are specified
as VOL:fredleg.  Anyway, one day I copied a file to a new volume without
specifying the filename (just the volume name).  You'd think that it'd
just use the original filename wouldn't you?  (I mean, even DOS does
that).  Wrong.  It copied the file directly onto the volume.  There was
now a file called VOL:  in my directory.  Worse than that, everything in
that volume (all the work i'd done in the past 4 hours) was gone.

These files weren't in DOS format, so running Norton or anything like
that wouldn't have worked.  So, I toddled over to my Xenix box and
copied the raw disk to a file in /tmp, ie cp /dev/fd196ds9 /tmp/disk,
then emacs'd the file.  I got it into a state where I could vi it, and
convert it back to DOS format (the package could read DOS disks).  It
took me about 10 minutes.

Dylan.
-- 
Matthew J Farwell: dylan@ibmpcug.co.uk || ...!uunet!ukc!ibmpcug!dylan
	But you're wrong Steve. You see, its only solitaire.