Macos – Can files deleted with rm -rf be recovered

macosrmterminalUbuntuunix

When I delete folders or files in through osx terminal using the rm -rf, where do they go? I heard that some say they are deleted directly, but some also say it only "remove the link to the file making it unable to be found or accessed without special tools" ( Where do files and directories go when I run 'rm -rf folder_or_file_name' in Ubuntu 10.04? ).

Someone said something about ext3 being able to save rm-ed files in ubuntu but what about mac?

Best Answer

Files deleted using rm are not easily recovered and, although the contents are not overwritten by the rm command the space they occupy is marked as free space and can be used for new files or for additional content added to existing files.

As soon as the rmcommand completes, the system is no longer keeping any record of the location of the data for that file.

There are file-recovery tools you can use, but that is a separate question. If you don't have a backup - stop using the computer and look for file-recovery tools. Be prepared for total loss though as recovery is not guaranteed.

See

Related Solutions

Linux – Where do files and directories go when I run ‘rm -rf folder_or_file_name’ in Ubuntu 10.04

As far as I know a 'rm' command completely removes files and directories. There are "undelete" options, but there is no such thing as a "Trash" or "Recycle Bin"

Linux – bash – directories ending in . and whitespace cannot be removed

rm and mv can also detect the directories just fine, but it you type: rm file then the shell will ignore the whitespace.

There are a few things you can do to work around this. The easiest is to encapsulate the filename in quotes. Another solution is to escape the special char, e.g. with a backslash

Example:

touch "testfile "

host:/home/username/test>ls -al
total 12
drwx------   2 hennes  users  4096 Sep 26 02:44 .
drwxr-xr-x  34 hennes  users  8192 Sep 26 01:39 ..
-rw-------   1 hennes  users     0 Sep 26 02:44 testfile

Now to delete them, either:

rm "testfile ", or

rm testfile\ (please notice the whitespace after the backslash)

As for filenames ending in a dot. I can not reproduce the problem. Are you sure it ends in a dot and not in some other special char?

toad:/home/hennes/test>bash --version
GNU bash, version 4.1.10(1)-release (amd64-portbld-freebsd7.3)
Copyright (C) 2009 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later 

This is free software; you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

toad:/home/hennes/test>touch Fun.

toad:/home/hennes/test>ls
Fun.

toad:/home/hennes/test>rm Fun.
toad:/home/hennes/test>ls
toad:/home/hennes/test>

If it is another char than a dot then read up on the Internal file separator in bash. You can set it to something else, or just use commands sunch as find with -print0. (Example find /path/to/search-name 'SomeFilePattern*' -print0 | some_command)

Best Answer

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Linux – Where do files and directories go when I run ‘rm -rf folder_or_file_name’ in Ubuntu 10.04

Linux – bash – directories ending in . and whitespace cannot be removed

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