[Linux] Journal.

It’s been a very unfortunate week… Made a really REALLY stupid mistake today,
did a rm -rf /usr when I meant rm -rf usr
and didn’t realised for 5 seconds. Deleted /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, and a
big chunk of /usr/share directories.

Steps taken to recover

copy files without scp

copy bin and sbin from officemate. Don’t
have scp anymore so use nc instead:

my laptop:

$ nc -l -p 6666 | tar xv 

his laptop:

$ tar zv /usr/bin | nc 9.4.21.36 6666

See which files are missing

$ locate locate '/usr/*' | sort

to see files before deletion (locate reads from cache)

$ find /usr/ | sort

to see files after deletion.

wc -l and diff the outputs. *sniff*

Locate packages to reinstall

$ dpkg -S filename

find package that provides this file

$ dpkg -l | grep "^ii" | awk '{print $2;}'

list just the names of packages installed

$ apt-get --reinstall install package_name

force reinstall packages

To reinstall all the installed packages:

#!/usr/bin/perl

@packages = `dpkg -l | grep "^ii"`;

$install = "";for $i (@packages){    my ($a, $b, $c, $d) = split /\s/, $i;    $install = "$install $c";}

`apt-get --reinstall install $install`;

To reinstall the packages that provides the missing files:

#!/usr/bin/perl## Find and reinstall packages that provided for accidentally deleted system files#

@orig_files = `cat files/orig_files`; # generated by locate

%packages = ();

for $i (@orig_files){    if(not `ls $i`){        $package = `dpkg -S $i`;        if($package){            ($package, $x) = split /:/, $package;            $packages{"$package"} = 1;        }    }}

@uniq_packages = keys %packages;

print "@uniq_packages"

Run the script:

$ ./replace_missing.pl > unique;$ apt-get --reinstall install `cat uniq`;

Some package names in output file contains ‘,’ and some packages can’t
be downloaded. So removed them manually and tried again.

Will not work as root. Will use sudo instead.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2004 at 3:31 pm and is filed under System. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.