> On Fri, 22 Jul 2005 11:13, Michael JasonSmith wrote: > > On Fri, 2005-07-22 at 10:08 +1200, John Carter wrote: > > > I have heard many cries about the lack of a recycle bin in Linux. > > > > Not from the KDE or GNOME users :) > > > > > Just remember that if you want to get rid of things for ever, you use > > > "rm". "rm" means I want it dead, gone, never to plague me again... > > > > Oh! if only it was that simple :) > Indeed! > > > (Lets not go there!) > But people should know that the 'rm' command merely flags the file in the > directory as removed and returns the space which the file occupied to the > free list. i.e. It does not remove the data from the disk at all. The space > will probably get over-written at some indeterminate time in the future.
OTOH people often want to undelete a file they mistakeny trashed, so this behaviour is not always undesirable. NB: ext2 undelete is fairly trivial as the inode remains intact.. ext3 is a lot more difficult owing to the different steps that are taken on ext3 when a file is deleted - IIRC the inode is blanked out, making the list of. blocks in the file unavailable. So while ext3 does in fact leave the data on disk, it trashes the inode, making it far more difficult to recover the file. Been there done that discussed it with Ted T'so, still have an untouched 10G hard drive with deleted precious photos I will try again to recover when I get a few spare weeks. > -- Nick Rout
