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I made a mistake when moving a set of file by this command mv src/* .. instead of mv src/* .

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See superuser.com/questions/279733/undo-an-rm-rf-command for some possible solutions. – isomorphismes Aug 28 '12 at 23:51

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up vote 7 down vote accepted

You can try using find to discover which files in ".." was modified at the time you made the erroneous mv, and then mv them in the right place again (using -exec find option for example).

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Thanks for your suggestion ! I use this command find ../* -mmin -5 -type f -exec mv '{}' . ; I saw that it mv all the file in parent directory include file're not modified. Do you have any ideas for this command ? – billyduc Sep 10 '09 at 2:57
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I don't think there's any. Same goes with rm, which is different from trashing.

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Hey, it's not exactly true that there's nothing you can do to get a rm or mv-ed file back. The (negentropic) bits are still there, arranged in the right sequence. Kust the pointer in the file allocation table is gone. It's not impossible but it is difficult to find the bits and put the pointer back. – isomorphismes Aug 28 '12 at 23:42
up vote 4 down vote

You cannot 'undo' it easily other than by sorting out which files belong where and to move them back again. Alternatively, you could restore from a backup and then compare the files from the backup and the present system to help.

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