rm -rf : What does it really do

[Net Llama!]

On 05/03/03 08:50, Tom Wilson wrote:
> On Saturday 03 May 2003 09:31 am, Joel Hammer's voice rose above the 
> ones in my head and stated:
>> Just an idle thought while waiting for rm -rf* to remove a 40 gig
>> directory.
>>
>> This is taking quite a while. Does  rm just unlink files, leaving the
>> data recoverable, or does it make the date unrecoverable?
> 
> I'm not sure about unlinking but *some* of the data can be recoverable 
> but only if you shutdown you system ASAP then boot to runlevel 1 and 
> remount the partition the filesystem is on as read only.  If not, the 
> os starts re-using the inodes of the deleted data pretty soon.

This is very heavily depedent on the type of filesystem in use, whether 
it has a journal, and how often that journal is updated.  In fact, on 
Linux, i'd say your statement is only truly accurate for ext2.

-- 
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
L. Friedman                       	       netllama at linux-sxs.org
Linux Step-by-step & TyGeMo: 		    http://netllama.ipfox.com

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