RWPT - My Day Ruining Maneuver
So here is a nice little tip that is a direct result of sleep deprivation and bad habit.
I was working on some C# code that grabs some log files and wraps them up into a cab file and moves them off to a different location. After that it clears the directory so new logs can be written. In writing the code I figured I would take the liberty of trying to get everything in the folder deleted except for the tool itself.
So in thinking I did this:
---snip---
Directory.Delete(Directory.GetCurrentDirectory(), true);
---end---
Where Directory refers to System.IO.Directory
So I am trucking along, writing some other functionality and I finally compiled the code... I fixed the compilation errors (usually missing semi-colons or curly brackets) and I went to test. I had a test directory C:\testdir\testdata where the tool was to be run in testdir and the data to be put in the cab file was in testdata.
Of course at 2:30am I am not thinking about the code I wrote an hour or two before, nor do I think about running this under the debugger. No I dragged the tool from the debug directory straight into a default command prompt. I was puzzled as the code did not return. So I went and looked at the code, thinking I might have done something wrong. I spent about 10 minutes looking. I figured it was hung somewhere so I looked for any potential hanging points - maybe a for loop where I put a greater than sign where I needed a less than sign or something like that. I went to control + C the running code and I caught a glimpse of my desktop...
Zero icons. Of course I had no browsing history anymore either. No PST's. No documents in the My Documents folder.
My default command prompt centers at %userprofile%... the "true" in the Directory.Delete means "go into all of the sub directories and torch everything."
Luckily I had a fairly recent backup. For the rest I used a third party file recovery tool.
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
