Did I corrupt my OS?

Question

I typed this command in the terminal while trying to check if I correctly installed LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) equivalent packages in Ubuntu:

sudo mv /home testing.html /var/www/html

I am new to this, and i wanted to move the testing.html file from home to /var/www/html folder and then run the http://localhost/testing.html to check if installation is complete.

After that it started displaying that my home directory and my directory under it; named yashgugale has been deleted (yashgugale had all the system files). Every time i tried to access documents, pictures, etc. under yashgugale. Now it even refused to open terminal and I was unable to copy my yashgugale folder back into default start directory.

Where did I go wrong and how I can correct this problem?

Answer 1

Note: Before trying anything, try Dan's solution in a comment under your question:

Press Alt+F2, this will open dash in a way to allow to run a command. Try running pkexec mv /var/www/html/home /home in that box.

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I suspect you may have moved /home to /var/www/html/home

If that's the case, run the following to reverse the process:

sudo mv /var/www/html/home /home 

Otherwise, if needed you can recreate a home for your user with:

sudo mkdir /home/$USER
sudo chown $USER: /home/$USER

You should have originally typed something like:

sudo mv /path/to/testing.html /var/www/html/

Note the trailing slash. /var/www/html is the html directory. /var/www/html/ means inside the html directory. It's not always needed but I prefer it as it gets me in the habit of giving the system unambivalent instructions.

Note: You will probably need to do this via a livecd:

As per http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/linux/reset-your-ubuntu-password-easily-from-the-live-cd/?PageSpeed=noscript, boot up your livecd, open a terminal and enter the following:

fdisk -l

This will show you which hard drive you are using, typically /dev/sda1. Then type the following, replacing sda1 with whatever your drive is:

sudo mkdir /media/sda1
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /media/sda1
sudo chroot /media/sda1

This mounts your hard drive to the livecd and puts you in chroot. You can now do what I said at the beginning of this answer.

exit

Now reboot your original system and you should be ok.