So I was trotting along happily in my terminal and unwittingly let slip this little oopsy daisy...

sudo mv /* /opt/eclipse

...while trying to install a plugin from my current directory to my eclipse installation directory. Obviously, what I meant to do was mv ./* ... but that's
besides the point now.

It gave me some nasty hardrive error messages which I, in my panic, failed
to write down. Does anyone here know what the expected behaviour of this would do
to my filesystem? Is it irreparable, or do I at least have a hope of saving my
home folder?

The filesystem itself should be fine, just possibly not as bootable as you remember. Try grabbing a bootable Linux disc, and you should be able to mount your hard drive and copy any valuable data. Then try either recover the installation (I have no idea how though) or just reinstall from scratch.

I've read some forum posts around the net that say the same thing. Except for one particularly disgruntled old tech who felt that just loading the "tapes" and reinstalling the system was the best solution.

That is to say I'm going to recover my files and install from scratch. I've never had 100% success with the repair mechanisms of any operating system.

Puppy linux to the rescue.

I would have naively tried to move everything back from /opt/eclipse to /

Shouldn't that work ? If you don't remember what exactly was in /opt/eclipse before your typo, just move everything, and then take back eclipse stuff, identifying it by asking someone, or reinstalling a fresh eclipse.

This problem should be fixable, since the system probably refused to move files it was using at the moment, causing those errors you saw. As SriLumpa said, just move everything back, then extract a fresh eclipse to a directory, to identify the files/directory you don't want in / (they do no harm though). Good luck hacking your linux box, and if it works, you'll feel awesome :-)

Quote: Original post by Don Carnage
This problem should be fixable, since the system probably refused to move files it was using at the moment, causing those errors you saw.

Unlike Windows, you can freely move and even delete files that are currently open. In the latter case, the files are unlinked from the filesystem, but the inode and data stick around until the last file handle referencing them is closed.

The errors he got could be caused by a number of unrelated things, perhaps w.r.t. special files (e.g. trying to move stuff from /sys or /proc).

In any case, while blindly moving things back from /opt/eclipse to / might work (you'll probably have to do that after booting from CD), the best advice was to take some bootable CD with Linux, copy your home onto a USB disk, and reinstall. That way, you can be certain that no lingering side effects stick around.