Relinking a deleted file

Posted by mbac32768 on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by mbac32768
Published on 2010-08-10T14:32:17Z Indexed on 2012/12/06 17:07 UTC
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Sometimes people delete files they shouldn't, a long-running process still has the file open, and recovering the data by catting /proc/<pid>/fd/N just isn't awesome enough. Awesome enough would be if you could "undo" the delete by running some magic option to ln that would let you re-link to the inode number (recovered through lsof).

I can't find any Linux tools to do this, least with cursory Googling.

What do you got, serverfault?

EDIT1: The reason catting the file from /proc/<pid>/fd/N isn't awesome enough is because the process which still has the file open is still writing to it. A delete removes the reference to the inode from the filesystem namespace. What I want is a way of re-creating the reference.

EDIT2: 'debugfs ln' works but the risk is too high since it frobs raw filesystem data. The recovered file is also crazy inconsistent. The link count is zero and I can't add links to it. I'm worse off this way since I can just use /proc/<pid>/fd/N to access the data without corrupting my fs.

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