If you ran this as a non-root user then you didn't move any system files you just made some copies. Delete the new copies and you should be fine.
Got chills down my spine initially but was a "good" scare .... the one which makes me carefull next time before any real damage is done. 🙈👍
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).
Mark it as an achievement on your learning path and move on. We all did something silly like that at some point.
Great that you have backups, get a fresh install and restore it.
Lessons learned: don't work as root unless you absolutely positively have a good reason to do so.
I have the habit of holding shift everytime I delete something, one day I'll learn the hard way not to do it
I only have a backup of my own personal files, not of the whole system. So my question about impact is about not having to do a fresh install.
Also I have dual boot and grub etc do scare me. 😁
I didnt work as root by the way ...
I always treat the system as discardable and only backup the /home and /etc directories. Saving those, I can afford to wipe the system and re-settle on a new distro if I want to.
Of course if you throw Windows into the mix, all bets are off. Personally, I stay the hell away from that.
Yeah agree, its a work provided laptop, they allowed local admin etc but require Windows (at least that is) so just glad they gave me a HP laptop with 500GB SSD and for me certain freedom to configure dual boot etc
I'd probably do a clean install (eventually) even if it looked like stuff works for now.
I know the pain, though. did rm -rf in the wrong directory and wiped half my drive in seconds. Good times.
Ouuuuch 😬
I took a deep breath (was not being root, how bad could it be?) and rebooted. Luckily everything seemed fine.
Grub letting me choose between Debian and Win11 (its a laptop from my employer) and both booted if choosen. Thanks for all the advice.
If you did it as root probably broken, if not it should be ok, you might just get programs behaving weirdly.
Ah, I was no root .... that should lower the impact ...
It looks like you grabbed stuff from /dev which I think can't be moved, it's created and managed by the kernel
I think there is a typo in the path in the body of your post, or?
Yeah, I see, command wildcard asterix being markdown bold. Original command:
What you have in title of the post, body of the post and in this screenshot all disagree with each other.
Ah, keen eye, corrected the title and body text to match the screenshot. (From terminal history so I think thats what I actually ran)
You moved everything down 3 dirs from root to your working dir.
Ouch ... feel so stupid.
I once ran 'chown -R root:root /' in a misguided attempt to solve some permissions issues I was having. 0/10, do not recommend. It turns out a lot of system things aren't root owned...
Running a stupid command and learning from it is part of the learning process.
Anything user accessible, so not that bad. Restore one backup up and move from there.
Use backtics to quote code fragments. Tripple backtics to block quote. You should be able to edit your post.
Oh that worked, thnx!!
Unless you ran the command as root, on a standard install it should really only be able to touch your home directory and any disks you may have had user mounted under /media.
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