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I have been using Ubuntu11.04 for last 3-4 months. Few day ago, I installed wine1.4 to run .exe files on my system. Now a virus is flooded in the entire system which creates a .exe file in each & every folder. And I am unable to view pdf files, .doc documents not even C programs. All the files are corrupted. I am about to loose all of my data & unfortunately.... quit UBUNTU ... Anyone please let me know how to recover this data...

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1 Answer

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First of all, get rid of your Wine folder, be careful to backup any data in it before you do this:

rm -rf ~/.wine
rm -rf ~/.local/share/applications/wine

After that, get rid of all your .exe files with:
(You will loose ALL your exe files!)

sudo find / -name "*.exe" -delete

When finished, reboot, and see if the issue is resolved. If not, issue the command:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure -a

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The sudo dpkg-reconfigure -a should be useless since it has nothing to the with the package management system, else, top notch of answer! :) – Bruno Pereira♦ Dec 3 '12 at 10:20
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The reconfigure is because we don't now what was corrupted exactly. We don't now either what happened with the files mentioned by the user. – Frantique Dec 3 '12 at 10:24
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kk, makes sense. Even though I would be really amazed if the .exe files actually did anything to any system files. These kind of virus are normally targeted at modifying specific Windows system files and just replicating themselves. – Bruno Pereira♦ Dec 3 '12 at 10:27
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I've edited the answer for 2 reasons: find command was probably not going to work with a lot of matches that way, and Wine programs only have access in your home dir, so it's not necessary to remove all also valid Mono-.exe files on the entire filesystem. (and then someone reverted my edit) – gertvdijk Dec 3 '12 at 10:40
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@omjaijagdish Open the Properties of a PDF file and go to the "Open With" tab and set "Documents Viewer" as Default. – japzone Dec 3 '12 at 15:45
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