Arch Linux

erniee

Member

Registered: 2005-11-27

Posts: 15

DELETED USR

I made a HUGE mistaked today, I delted my usr directory by accident I meant to do cp -R usr/ / but for some reason I used rm -R like an idiot. So how do I get it back? This is a stupid mistake. Thanks for reading and hope you have an idea.

T-Dawg

Forum Fellow

From: Charlotte, NC

Registered: 2005-01-29

Posts: 2,736

Re: DELETED USR

what kind of filesystem are you using?

Have a look at this thread for recovering files from a reiserfs partition.

Dusty

Schwag Merchant

From: Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada

Registered: 2004-01-18

Posts: 5,986

Website

Re: DELETED USR

one thing you could try is pacman -Sc and then pacman -U /var/cache/pacman/pkg/*. That will reinstal all packages and since /usr usually contains only files managed by pacman, should restore it to pristine condition. It won't help with thnigs you've installed or modified locally though.

Dusty

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erniee

Member

Registered: 2005-11-27

Posts: 15

Re: DELETED USR

Awesome, thanks guys. I do use Resiser FS sorry for not including, I was in a bit of a rush when I wrote this post. I'll let you guys know if it that gets me going and I'll append a fix to the title. Thanks again.

patroclo7

Member

From: Bassano del Grappa, ITALY

Registered: 2006-01-11

Posts: 915

Re: DELETED USR

If you have deleted /usr, you can not use pacman, which was in /usr/bin/pacman

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Dusty

Schwag Merchant

From: Medicine Hat, Alberta, Canada

Registered: 2004-01-18

Posts: 5,986

Website

Re: DELETED USR

If you have deleted /usr, you can not use pacman, which was in /usr/bin/pacman

very true, you'd need to untar the package directly and then grab pacman.static from inside.

Dusty

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** Arch Linux Apparel and more ** Arch Linux stickers, laptop bags, jewelery ** I wrote a book on Python 3 ** and one on mental health **

erniee

Member

Registered: 2005-11-27

Posts: 15

Re: DELETED USR

I'm still a bit of a noob and I'm not sure how to go about untarring whichever package we're speaking about anyone know where to point me to?

Cerebral

Forum Fellow

From: Waterloo, ON, CA

Registered: 2005-04-08

Posts: 3,108

Website

Re: DELETED USR

To untargz a package, just run

tar xzf filename

or, specifically for pacman,

tar xzf /var/cache/pacman/pkg/pacman-2.9.8-1.pkg.tar.gz

You might want to do this in a temporary folder so you don't accidentally overwrite anything in /etc

copernikus

Member

From: Philadelphia, PA

Registered: 2005-12-09

Posts: 16

Re: DELETED USR

To untargz a package, just run

tar xzf filename

umm... I could be wrong, not on my arch box but isn't tar in /usr/bin?

Anyway, best bet would be to fire up a live cd and mount your drives and use the livecds tar to get pacman back.

-Fran

T-Dawg

Forum Fellow

From: Charlotte, NC

Registered: 2005-01-29

Posts: 2,736

Re: DELETED USR

tar is in /bin

I still think the filesystem recovery procedure is a better route. You have to be sure that if you do a pacman -U /var/cache/pacman/pkg/* that everything in that folder was everything that you have installed. YOu also have to factor in older packages and cleared cache....

Maybe you could do something with pamcan -Q and strip out the versions so you can give it as a list to pacman to reinstall

erniee

Member

Registered: 2005-11-27

Posts: 15

Re: DELETED USR

Luckily I gave in and took the "easy route" and just reinstalled Arch, I won't make this noobified mistake again, and luckily I hardly had anything on my computer at that moment so all is well, thanks for the great suggestions in case it someday helps someone else out there.