Recover Accidentally Deleted Files in OS X via Terminal, "command not found"

You command is wrong.

In the Terminal run the following command which will show all (-a) files in your Trash. If however, you compulsively emptied your Trash (as I tend to do), your file(s) are gone. That is the (ell)s command below.

Mys-MacBook-Pro:~ storedisk$ ls -a .Trash

If you file is in the Trash, you can retrieve it:

Mys-MacBook-Pro:~ storedisk$ mv .Trash/filename .

The following syntax will show all files. You would supply FALSE to not show all files. The values of true or 1 and false or 0 will also work.

Mys-MacBook-Pro:~ storedisk$ defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -bool TRUE

You left off the home directory target (.) on your move command. If this is confusing, you can also use $HOME, or ~ to represent your home login directory

Mys-MacBook-Pro:~ storedisk$ mv .Trash/FLiCKS .

The command sequence:

Mys-MacBook-Pro:~ storedisk$ mv .Trash/FLiCKS .

would have moved the FLiCKS folder out of the Trash and put it in the following location:

Mys-MacBook-Pro:~ storedisk$

If you do the following, the FLiCKS folder should appear. The vertical bar is a pipe symbol that takes the output from ls and feeds it to the grep utility, that in this case, will list the folder FLiCKS if it is in this directory location (to the left). If you did the ls -al on the FLiCKS folder itself, it would list its folder contents.

Mys-MacBook-Pro:~ storedisk$ ls -al | grep FLiCKS

Glad to help. Thank you for letting me be patient.

Hi

I'm having a similar problem.

I was rearranging somethings on my external hardrive and relocating them onto my desktop.

From the desktop I accidently deleted three folders into the trash and emptied it.

This happened last night.

Is there any way I can retrieve them or undo the "empty trash" function via Terminal?

There are tons of data recovery programs however, they recover files and do not present the files again in the folder format they were originally in prior to deletion.

Any input you have would be greatly appreciated!

Thank you.

Once you empty the Trash, the files are gone. If there were any competent data recovery applications for OS X, by the time you decided to purchase, and learn how to effectively use them, any ability to recover the lost data would be close to impossible as the original file bytes have been overwritten or reallocated for other storage.

It does underscore the need for a consistent backup methodology (e.g. Time Machine).

Yes,
If you did not empty the Trash, click on the Trash icon at the right side of the Dockand drag those files to a different location.

If you emptied the Trash, it is more difficult. Typically, when a file is erase, it is not really erased. The space the file occupied become unallocated, so that new data can be written over that space. If new data files have not yet been written over that space, the old data is still there and may be recoverable.

There are utilities specifically for data recovery. For example (I have not used)

http://www.prosofteng.com/products/data_rescue.php

Other more general utilities, such as TechTool Pro by Micromat, have a data recovery "module" as part of the package. I have this utility (and it's a good product), but I have never used it for doing data recovery.

You may be able to use such tools to recover erased data. If you intend to try, you should use the disk that held the erased data as little as possible, to reduce the likelihood that new data files will be written over the space used by the old data.

I accidentally emptied my Mac trash bin a few days ago and I tried many methods on Google, but none of them worked. And then I tried to download data recovery programs which are suggested by my friend and choose one of them. It can scan for my lost files and get them back to me. You can have a try on it. http://www.uflysoft.com/data-recovery-mac/