How do I recover the contents of a file?

Question

I accidentally executed man ls > info.txt and now I don't know how to recover the contents of the file.

@JeffSchaller those links are about delete/undelete entire files, not about content of them. — Fatemeh Abdollahei, Oct 28 '17 at 11:48
But is it still in RAM or swap? If yes, it won’t be for long. Search for a combination of words present in your old file. — user2497, Oct 28 '17 at 13:17

score 1 · Accepted Answer · edited Oct 28 '17 at 11:27

you've wrote the output of "man ls" command in a file that you called it "info.txt". If your info.txt file was empty, now easily you can delete your file and create new one by using these commands:

#rm -f info.txt
#vi info.txt

(thenCtrl + X and press yes to save it.)

Or:

you can open info.txt file, and delete content of it. for example, if you use "nano" editor, you can follow steps:

# nano info.txt  
#ctrl+k
(pressing ctrl+k on each line) 
#ctrl+x 
save your edition.

But if your info.txt file had something before overwriting, unfortunately you can't retrieve it.

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 28 '17 at 10:34

If you're hoping to recover the contents of info.txt, I'm sorry but you're SOL -- that data has been overwritten by the output of the man command. Not just deleted, which can sometimes be recovered, but overwritten, which generally can't without a professional (IE, law enforcement forensics or higher grade) data recovery setup.

How do I recover the contents of a file?

2 Answers2