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After trying to remove Wine from Ubuntu, all my files were suddenly gone. That is, I do not see any of my documents etc., but my hard drive says only 3 GB is still available (which is common for my small hard drive).

The problem occurred after doing this: How to remove wine completely and then the top rated answer (of pagal pila). Most likely I did something not appropriate for my version/pc (Learned the hard way that people shouldn't just try commands they don't understand).

Does anyone know how to recover/show my removed/hidden files?

As commented, I ran history:

    1  sudo apt-get remove --purge wine  
    2  rm -rf $HOME/ .wine  
    3  sudo  
    4  sudo rm -rf $HOME/.wine  
    5  sudo rm -f $HOME/.config/menus/applications-merged/wine*  
    6  rm -f $HOME/.config/menus/applications-merged/wine*  
    7  rm -rf $HOME/.local/share/applications/wine  
    8  rm -f $HOME/.local/share/desktop-directories/wine  
    9  rm -f $HOME/.local/share/icons/????_*.xpm  
   10  sudo apt-get remove --purge wine  
   11  sudo apt-get update  
   12  sudo apt-get autoclean  
   13  sudo apt-get clean  
   14  sudo apt-get autoremove  
   15  apt-get update
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    Please edit your question and show us the exact commands you ran. You can see them by opening a terminal and running history.
    – terdon
    Jun 23, 2016 at 9:11
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    Lesson learned: Don't use f in rm unless you have confirmed it will delete what is intended and always check rm commands more than once ;-) Oh and the mandatory: always make a backup on regular intervals.
    – Rinzwind
    Jun 23, 2016 at 10:04
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    Great tip on linking to the instructions you followed that caused the nuking, we have added comments on that page, hoping to prevent the next one following them from making the same mistakes as you
    – Ferrybig
    Jun 23, 2016 at 19:03
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    Line 2 in your history says it all. An extra space bettween $HOME and .wine first deleted your entire home directory, and then a file called .wine in your working directory.
    – user35581
    Jun 23, 2016 at 20:57
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2 Answers 2

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rm -rf $HOME/ .wine I see a space there ... You nuked your home with that.

Does anyone have a clue how to recover/show my removed/hidden files?

Got a backup? If so use that. Otherwise ...

  • do NOTHING with that system. N O T H I N G. Any change to that bit of the disk lowers your ability to recover anything from it.
  • Boot up a Live DVD and install "testdisk" in it.
  • Run testdisk and have it scan that partition.
  • Start praying.
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    Ouch!! That really hurts! Do you know why he used that -rf option? Like why rm wasn't enough? I think this a very good lesson for newbies not to trust commands (or arguments) they don't fully understand.
    – ipse lute
    Jun 23, 2016 at 9:57
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    @ipselute, I don't know if this is exactly why, but when I have tried deleting Wine-related resources in the past it asks rm: remove write-protected regular empty file 'FILENAME'? for every single file. Using rm -rf skips the prompts. Jun 23, 2016 at 13:13
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    My recommendation to avoid this kind of thing: always use the graphical file manager to delete things. Jun 23, 2016 at 13:45
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    @MichaelKjörling, the -r option tells rm to operate recursively on the directory you pass it. The -f option suppresses a lot of prompts related to deleting read-only files or deleting files that were passed to rm but not present on the filesystem.
    – sherrellbc
    Jun 23, 2016 at 14:50
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    Always do an equivalent ls to check what is shown and would be deleted. Plus I would advice to create a backup with tar so you can revert the deleting if you do not create backups regularly.
    – Rinzwind
    Jun 23, 2016 at 14:54
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Here

rm -rf $HOME/ .wine  

There is a space between $HOME and .wine. So, it means that rm has to force (f) the recursive (r) removal of both $HOME and .wine.

So, you chose to remove all the things in your home folder :)

There is no "undo" option here, the best solution is to recover from a previous backup.

Or, you can try from a live file system to use testdisk and photorec in order to recover your data.

Please note that, if you used the computer after the disaster occurred, it is highly unprobable that you will succeed at it.

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