Geez. Not the time to make a mistake like this at midnight :P. Arrghh... now iceweasel is highlighting every word as mispelt.

Anyways, I accidentally rm -fr /usr/lib/'ed. It was actually an rm -fr * as root, but the cd command before it had a typo.

I'm really tired, but I don't want to shut down my computer yet.

I did keep a backup of the first 10 files in there, obviously no good because there were hundreds of files in there. I cp'd them in anyway. Is it safe to reboot? And most importanty, HOW CAN I RECOVER THESE FILES??

Hi, welcome to LQ!

Don't panic ;}

What distro are you using?



Cheers,
Tink

Debian Lenny. Thanks for helping

And somewhat belated ... does your system hold on to
all the packages in /var/cache/apt/archives ? Is apt
and/or aptitude still working?
If you still have them a
cd /var/cache/apt/archives && dpkg -i *deb
should do the trick w/o too much hassle (of course
I'm no debian expert).


Cheers,
Tink

Yeah, this kinda sucks. I just got rid of the cache to save disk space.

Here's what I'm thinking of doing (Downloading the .iso right now). Since I dual boot with Windows XP (in case anything like this happens), I'll make a new partition on my hard drive for a clean, new Lenny install. From there, I'll copy the .so's so that I can at least have the required basic .so's to boot into gui. From there, I can take care of that by a command I found:

"for pkg in `dpkg -l | grep ii | cut -f 3 -d " "`; do apt-get install --reinstall -y $pkg ;done"

I understand everything except the grep ii (Search for ii's in each line? I don't see any use in that..) and the cut. Would you explain how this works (Why ii needs to be in the line and the cut command)?

Keep in mind that I need to perform this first step, because I can't even access apt-get/aptitude because they require some .so. I remember that apt-get complained of a missing stdlibc6++ (something similar).