Arch Linux

speed145a

Member

Registered: 2008-05-02

Posts: 60

Website

super sleepy + being root user = pain... "cp" fiasco HELP

last night when i should have been sleeping i issued a command and now i'm perplexed...

i have several partitions:
/boot
/
/home
swap

i have a backup dir in /home/(USER)/backups  so i wanted to restore my /root directory

i went to /home/(USER)/backups/root (which is the backup of /root).  from here i issued "cp -r .* /root"

i realize that the command was then recursing through ../* and ../../*  which is really bad  :-)

i stopped the command when i noticed that my /home partition was almost full!  how could space be taken up on /home when the target was /root ???
also, i can't find for the life of me where the space has been taken up.  it almost feels like it just ruined the pointers or journals or something.

perhaps noteworthy is that /, /home, and swap are logical partitions, and /home and swap are encrypted and on /dev/mapper

any help would be great!!

Last edited by speed145a (2009-08-18 01:21:23)

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ARCH x86_64 ZEN

loafer

Member

From: the pub

Registered: 2009-04-14

Posts: 1,772

Re: super sleepy + being root user = pain... "cp" fiasco HELP

Where you root when you did this?  Also specifying /root would copy to roots home directory.

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All men have stood for freedom...
For freedom is the man that will turn the world upside down.
Gerrard Winstanley.

speed145a

Member

Registered: 2008-05-02

Posts: 60

Website

Re: super sleepy + being root user = pain... "cp" fiasco HELP

Where you root when you did this?  Also specifying /root would copy to roots home directory.

I was root... never root when you are in a zombie like trance.

the fact that i specified /root as the target is what perplexed me when /home started filling up.   why???

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ARCH x86_64 ZEN

perbh

Member

From: Republic of Texas

Registered: 2005-03-04

Posts: 765

Re: super sleepy + being root user = pain... "cp" fiasco HELP

*lol* next time, I guess you would use

cp -r .[A-z]* /root