Even though I usually avoid using GUIs for recoveries*, given my main workstation is a Mac, I don’t have the option of using a NetWorker GUI for personal recoveries anyway.
Over time I’ve become one of those users that many Unix sysadmins dislikes – I name files and folders with prefixes including:
-
*
and
#
Heck, I even use ? and ? as directory prefixes.
It caught me by surprise then when I tried to recover a directory called “-Proposal”. My natural inclination was to go to the parent directory of “-Proposal” and type:
recover> add -Proposal
usage: add [-q] [filename] – add `filename’ to list of files to be recovered
As you can see, that didn’t particularly work.
Nor did the following:
recover> add — -Proposal
usage: add [-q] [filename] – add `filename’ to list of files to be recovered
Nor did:
recover> add ‘-Proposal’
usage: add [-q] [filename] – add `filename’ to list of files to be recovered
As you can imagine, it was starting to get a little bit frustrating.
To cut a long story short, in a scenario where you need to recover a directory that starts with a dash, you need to do something along the lines of the following:
- If the directory still exists, change into that directory in the shell, and run recover from there, or
- Add the parent directory, then exclude the files/directories you don’t need recovered, or
- If the directory doesn’t exist, make the directory, change into that directory in the shell, and run recover from there.
None of these are ideal solutions, but they do work. I hope, if you need to recover such a directory, you manage to stumble across this tip or you remember it – there are few things worse than worrying that something you really need to recover seems an impossibility.
–
* If you can’t turn off a file-by-file selection when you’re adding 10,000,000 files, a GUI is painful.
