IDG Contributor Network: Unix tip: Cleaning up your files

Here are some ways to deal with troublesome files on your Unix or Linux system.

Oops! Wrong location!

If you accidentally extract files from a tar file into the wrong location and want to reverse the process, here's a fairly easy way to do that.

Say you just extracted some files meant for /var/app/bin into /bin instead. Oops! You can spend a lot of time looking through a listing of the archive you just extracted from or you can remove the files with a command that contains a variation of the extract command. If, for example, you used the command tar xvf bin.tar.gz to extract the contents, then you could use this command to remove the files.

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