this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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The other day I learned that you can just grep an unmounted filesystem device. It will read the entire disk sequentially like it's one huuuuge file. And it will reveal everything on that disk... whether a file inode points to it or not.
Used it to recover data from a file I accidentally clobbered with an errant mv command. It's not reliable, but when you delete a file, it's usually not truly gone yet... With a little luck, as long as you know a unique snippet that was in it, you can find it again before the space gets something else written there. Don't even need special recovery tools to do it, just use dd in a for loop to read the disc in chunks that fit in RAM, and grep -a for your data.