Recovering /tmp file

Okay, so I did something very stupid and saved a file under /tmp, switched off my computer, and then booted it back up later to look for the file. (I blame lack of sleep.) Anyway, it was a simple text file that I didn't really want to write up again, so I decided to try to recover it. Since the file was on my laptop, and since Macs have a cool Firewire Target disk mode, I connected to my laptop from my Mini, and grepped the partition (it wasn't a really large file, but I hate having to retype something): grep -a -B100 -A100 'sentence that i remembered' /dev/partition > file.out While that ran, I just did my usual: read blogs, e-mail, and articles, and contacted some friends on the phone, etc. I came back every once in a while to see if file.out had any size. After about the fifth time checking, it grew to a whopping 40k! ;-) I then proceeded to use vim to extract the text I really needed, and I was done! Woo-hoo! This is something I can tell my students about who were asking what good the command line was. 'Course, they could retort and said I should have just saved my file somewhere else, but I think that's beside the point: the file was already lost, and I was trying to recover it. I'll see what they say Friday. :-)

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