I read from a book where it says, the command rm
deletes the inode
and not the file. Which means if I delete with the rm
command, then it cannot be restored.
I'm very new to Ubuntu environment. Now my doubt is, how does the Del key works? It is not deleting the inode
as far as I am concerned, because I can restore it from my Trash
folder. So am I right to say that Del key is doing a mv
command to Trash
folder leaving the inode
unchanged? Or am I missing something here?
Best Answer
Your understanding is essentially correct - the Del key as used in Nautilus (or other file manager) is NOT the same as using
rm
; it "moves" the file to Trash instead so that it can be recovered unless you Empty Trash (which is the same asrm
).Note that even if you
rm
a file, the actual data is still on the disk after the inode is deleted. If you act immediately before the data is eventually overwritten, you can still recover the data using a tool such astestdisk/photorec
.