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Correct me if I'm wrong, but rm doesn't wipe data out, it just deallocates the disk space devoted to it. If you actually managed to wipe out your entire file system with rm you could likely still recover your data with a recovery tool.

This story smells a wee bit fishy to me.

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It's just hard to get the filesystem entries for the file back. rm doesn't specifically wipe, you're right, but the filesystem entries are deleted, which means you basically have to grep the disk for bits of the file you want with known contents.

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