Undo (cp) copy command in Linux/Ubuntu

Let’s say you’ve copied a giant chunk of data from a source to destination something like this:

sudo cp From_SOURCE/* To_DESTINATION/

Now you wish to undo this command. Phew!!!

Solution:

This can be achieved using a python script for nerds like us,

The script

#!/usr/bin/env python

import os

source_dir = "/path/to/source" # the folder you copied the files from
target_folder = "/path/to/destination" # the folder you copied the files to

for root, dirs, files in os.walk(source_dir):
    for name in files:
        try:
            os.remove(target_folder+"/"+name)
        except FileNotFoundError:
            pass

How to use this thing?

• Paste the script in an empty file, save it as reverse.py,
• Insert the correct paths for source and target folder,
• Make it executable for convenience reasons,
• Run it by the command: [sudo] /path/to/reverse.py

Warning

First try on a test directory, I’m guessing the damage might be negligible but on your risk again!

Second thing to note:-

In case the source directory has no sub-directories, the script can even be simpler:

#!/usr/bin/env python

import os

source_dir = "/path/to/source" # the folder you copied the files from
target_folder = "/path/to/destination" # the folder you copied the files to

for file in os.listdir(source_dir):
    try:
        os.remove(target_folder+"/"+file)
    except FileNotFoundError:
        pass

TL;DR:

All files that are present in both src and dest can be removed from dest like this:

find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -exec cmp -s '{}' "$destdir/{}" \; -exec mv -n "$destdir/{}" "$toDelete"/ \;