deleting the contents of /home/oznola/.Private deleted the contents of /home/oznola..

[oshunluvr]

If you simply delete your entire home directory, it should be re-created at log in from scratch just like a new user.

One could create a new user and log in as the new user, then - assuming you gave the new user admin group rights - use sudo to remove the entire home directory. Or use a liveUSB/CD session to delete it.

[oznola]

i just restarted the machine and logged back in. problem solved...

[james147]

Adding the "-r" made the command recursive and includes directories. If you had added "sudo" to it, likely most all files on your system would have been deleted as well. Unfortunately, "*" includes ".." which equals "up one directory."

This is not true, * does not include . and .. and that would be insane... you can verify this by running "echo *". In fact * does not include any files the begin with a . for them you need .* (which does include . and ..). For all files that does not include . or .. you need ".[^.]* *"

Hindsight: rm -r /home/oznola/.Private/ would have been safer as would have using Dolphin.

It is never safe to remove a file or directory that you do not know what it does as in this case it removed the contents of the home directory.

i am reading the docs for extundelete and it says it's designed to be used on an unmounted partition and then restore the files from the unmounted partition to the one that is mounted. and that one must work quickly because processes read and write files all the time..

i am wondering if perhaps i can just some how recreate my home directory and start over without re-installing the entire system?

cp /etc/skel/.* ~

will restore all the needed files (.bashrc for example) everything else will be created as it is needed.