lost part of my "/usr/local"-filesystem - debian(woody)

[F. Kappen]

Hi all,

I inadvertently deleted part of my "/usr/local"-filesystem doing a "rm
-r /usr/local". Although I stopped the command immediately when I
noticed my fault, I lost about 90 Mb of the filesystem. Among others
were the directoies:

bin, games, include, lib, lost+found, man, sbin, share

My system is running, but I worry about the loss of the
"lost+found"-directory. Is this critical? And if so, is there a way to
repair it? Unfortunately I haven't made a backup yet, so I cannot
restore things from a backup-medium.

Considering the other lost directories, I think that is not so harmful
and I can refill them occasionally whenever an application is missing
a needed file. But perhaps somebodey can tell me which applcations put
their files by default in one of the above mentioned directories.

Thank you in advance
Friedhelm

[John-Paul Stewart]

"F. Kappen" wrote:

>
> Hi all,
>
> I inadvertently deleted part of my "/usr/local"-filesystem doing a "rm
> -r /usr/local". Although I stopped the command immediately when I
> noticed my fault, I lost about 90 Mb of the filesystem. Among others
> were the directoies:
>
> bin, games, include, lib, lost+found, man, sbin, share
>
> My system is running, but I worry about the loss of the
> "lost+found"-directory. Is this critical? And if so, is there a way to
> repair it?

'mkdir lost+found' maybe?

> Unfortunately I haven't made a backup yet, so I cannot
> restore things from a backup-medium.
>
> Considering the other lost directories, I think that is not so harmful
> and I can refill them occasionally whenever an application is missing
> a needed file. But perhaps somebodey can tell me which applcations put
> their files by default in one of the above mentioned directories.

On a Debian system, all .deb packages should normally put themselves in
/usr/bin, /usr/lib, etc. The only thing that you're likely to find in
/usr/local/bin are programs from other sources (e.g., programs you've
tarballs). Unfortunately, this makes it harder to recover without a
backup, unless you know what you've downloaded and installed there.

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

F. Kappen wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I inadvertently deleted part of my "/usr/local"-filesystem doing a "rm
> -r /usr/local". Although I stopped the command immediately when I
> noticed my fault, I lost about 90 Mb of the filesystem. Among others
> were the directoies:
>
> bin, games, include, lib, lost+found, man, sbin, share
>
> My system is running, but I worry about the loss of the
> "lost+found"-directory. Is this critical? And if so, is there a way to
> repair it? Unfortunately I haven't made a backup yet, so I cannot
> restore things from a backup-medium.

It's not usually vital. If /usr/local is a partition, that directory was
created when you built a filesystem on it, to store debris discovered
when you run "fsck" to check on or repair that filesystem.

Don't worry about it, I believe that most fsck-like programs will
automatically generate it on the fly.

> Considering the other lost directories, I think that is not so harmful
> and I can refill them occasionally whenever an application is missing
> a needed file. But perhaps somebodey can tell me which applcations put
> their files by default in one of the above mentioned directories.

"It depends". Many distributions do not use those at all, putting all
system files in /usr instead. /usr/local is very useful for packages
that are fresh built from new tarballs, hot off the griddle, before
anyone competent has had a chance to update the published packages, or
for putting a second version in place for comparison testing.

[F. Kappen]

Thank you John-Paul and Nico,

for your reply. Now I can sleep a little better - without worrying about
my disturbed filesystem.

Cheers
Friedhelm