That’s called wakeonlan <MAC address>

bash is weird

$ bash -c 'echo e*'
e*
$ fish -c 'echo e*'
fish: No matches for wildcard 'e*'. See `help wildcards-globbing`.
echo e*
     ^^```

Rookie mistake, now all your data is gone.

You need the -rf with unrm as well. -f because restoring / is a privileged operation and -r to recursively unrm everything.

No, you need to do unrm -unrf /

I installed Mint on my buddies computer yesterday and the install defaulted to ext4, and then had the audacity to have “Enable Backups” in the welcome dialog and only have RSYNC available.

It gave me the option to do my own partitions during setup but every time I clicked the link to do so the installer would hang. My buddy started getting nervous so I just left it on default. But I was very annoyed that I couldn’t easily just switch to BTRFS.

Filesystems are either pretty simple or really complex. The old dos FAT filesystem just overwrote the first character of a file name with an omega, and so usually you could just undelete by having a utility that would change the name back, as long as nothing used the blocks.

Modern filesystems are an absolute wonder of spinning wheels inside of spinning wheels allocating ranges of blocks, and then doing bookkeeping to reorganize linked data structures as fast as an SSD can write or as efficiently as possible on spinning rust.

Some log structured filesystems can do special snapshotting either automatically like NetApp ontap or manually like zfs so that when you take a snapshot any further changes preserve a view of that snapshot at a point in time that you can treat like a special directory where you can cd to and copy back out data as it was as long as you have space. Windows supports this kind of functionality with the VSS API if the underlying FS tech supports it.

The downside to these approaches is that they tend to cause fragmentation, can cause a lot of extra space to be used (after all, if you delete a tb, it may be because you meant to and you needed to, so if you mean it, why hasn’t it gone away, etc.,) and are a lot of complexity that 99% of the time 99% of the people don’t want to think about it or pay for it (pay as in it’s slower, uses more space, the complexity leads to more failure modes, etc )

Sometimes distros will alias rm with the -i flag so it prompts for each file. An annoyance but makes you stop and think before continuing.

i think the better way would be to replace rm with something that just moves files to a trash bin like how graphical file managers do it.

if you were just pulling the data back off the disk, and you didnt notice it IMMEDIATELY or a background process is writing some data, it could still be corrupted.

there was something like that i had on win3.2 called like undel.exe or something, but same deal, often it was courupted somehow by the time i was recovering the data

isn’t this just gvfs-trash?

Trash-cli probably does what the xdg desktop spec defines, is my guess, which is probably the same as most gui file managers. However trashing files just means moving them to some other hidden directory instead of deleting. So different implementations could use different locations for example, which may make sense in the desktop they where written for

The fear is real but in 30 years of unix and linux work, i’ve never actually deleted anything I didn’t mean to.

There is trash-cli, I found it in this thread.

Just Alias it.