Major Bonehead move:

[Tony Baechler]

First, why are you running a script as root?  A normal user account can't 
delete /bin unless your permissions are screwed up.  Second, as others have 
suggested, your best bet is probably to reinstall any broken packages. 
Finally, if /home and /etc are toast, try something like testdisk or a live 
rescue CD, but don't expect to recover a lot.  If you really need to run a 
script as root which could do serious damage, run it in a chroot next time. 
  I have a second drive just for backups to prevent cases like this, so try 
copying /home to another drive.  Don't feel too badly though.  I've read 
stories of quite a number of people who ran "rm -rf *" and thought they were 
in their home directory but were actually in the root.

On 8/29/2012 10:53 AM, Stephen Dawes wrote:
> After so many years of using Linux, I have finally done it, a Major Bonehead
> move. I wrote a script, and when I tested it, it went wild on me. When it
> ran it deleted the contents of /bin and I don't know what else. Any ideas,
> short of a re-install of the OS, on how to recover from this Major Bonehead
> move?