Subject: Address Book Zero'd Out ????

From: [email-masked] (Pete Holsberg)
Date: Tue, 11 Jul 1995 00:59:40 GMT

I was doing some sysadm chores as root today and executed a
"rm *" while I was in /var/mail. :-(

However I was surprised to find that the .addressbook files
for all users were zeroed out! Is that a function of pine
or ???

Pete

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From: [email-masked] (Jonathan and DearOldDad)
Date: 12 Jul 1995 05:39:02 GMT

Pete Holsberg ([email-masked]) wrote:
: I was doing some sysadm chores as root today and executed a
: "rm *" while I was in /var/mail. :-(
: However I was surprised to find that the .addressbook files
: for all users were zeroed out! Is that a function of pine
: or ???

Hhmmmm ... My guess is you were not in PINE you were in unix, and rm
filename means remove that filename and rm * means remove all files in the
directory.  There's one possible hope for recovery; The rm command does 
not actually delete the file, it removes the link to the file.

Removing a link (or in your case a whole bunch of links) is not really 
the same thing as deleting a file (as in DOS).

Bad news:  Now DOS has an undelete command, but unix doesna have an
unremove command. 

Good news:  Removing a link is not really the same as deleting, there may 
be more than one link to the file(s), and unix will not delete the actual 
file until the last link is removed.

Bad news:  In most cases (and probably in yours) there is only one link 
to a file, so removing this link deletes the file.

I'm gonna cross-post this to a unix comp group, and maybe someone else 
can help you out, 'cause that's the extent of my knowledge, and maybe 
someone else can take this further.  Hope this helps.  G'Day.

                             /\    /~~\/\  /\    /\      /\  /\   |>>
John (aka DearOldDad)     /\/\ \/\/   /  \/  \/\/  \/\/\/  \/  \/\|
Pocono Mtns PA USA EARTH /_/__\/_/___/_/\/___/[email-masked]|__

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