Re: [gentoo-user] I have 146,000 files in lost+found. How do I sort them?

[Robert Persson]

Thanks for the detailed advice. And thanks, Richard for your advice too.

In the end (before I received your posts) I managed to move all the
files into enough smaller directories that I could browse them in
Nautilus. From what I saw it looked very much to me like most of the
files were ones that had been deleted by emerge before the big disaster.
I didn't look at every single one obviously, but it soon became obvious
that I wasn't going to find much of any use.

And thanks for giving a practical example of how to use find. I have
always found the man page rather heavy going, so this is the first time
I have felt I have half an idea how to use it.

Robert

On Tue, 2006-26-09 at 08:20 -0500, Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. wrote:
> On Monday 25 September 2006 22:55, Robert Persson <ireneshusband@×××××.com>
> wrote about '[gentoo-user] I have 146,000 files in lost+found. How do I
> sort them?':
> > Am I likely to find many usable files in that /lost+found directory?
>
> Maybe.  I tried to recover a corrupted ext3 boot recently and was unable to
> pull anything useful out of lost and found that was larger than a
> symlink. :(  If a number of files NOT in lost+found were corrupt, it's
> likely most of the files in lost+found are corrupt as well.
>
> That said, /boot data is generally easy to replace, so I put no effort into
> recovering files that were corrupted.  If the data was valuable, if might
> be worth it to spend some time sorting those out.
>
> > If I can, how can I best sift through them?
>
> Carefully. :)
>
> > Is there a utility, or
> > something I could drop into a simple bash script, that would look at the
> > first few bytes of the file and, say, identify it as a jpeg or an xml
> > file, so that it could be given an appropriate file extension, deleted
> > or moved?
>
> As the other poster mentioned, the file utility is useful for identifying
> the type of file.  Keep in mind though that is only looks at the first few
> bytes of the file, if there's corruption later on file won't notice.
>
> > Or is there one that could distinguish a text file from a
> > binary?
>
> Of course, file does this to some extent.  A MIME type of text/* is
> generally text, while anything else is binary.  But, file's output (by
> default) isn't a simple "binary" or "text" string.
>
> Some of the GNU utilities that are meant for text files will complain
> before operating on a binary file, so you could use those for this task,
> possibly.  (I'm thinking of less and grep.)  In particular,
> grep '[^[:print:]]' should return true when run against a file that
> contains non-printable characters (like control characters or NUL, and,
> depending on locale, non-7-bit-clean characters).
>
> > Are there any other strategies I could use to sift through these files
> > (assuming it would be worth doing)?
>
> Well, before you write some sort of bash script around file to rename
> stuff, you'll probably want to remove anything that is clearly trash, like
> device nodes or 0-length files.  Something like:
> find lost+found \! \( -type f -o -type d \ -o -type l \) -o -empty -delete
> should work if you are using GNU find.
>

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