Ok, I screwed up!! I was playing with an xargs command in order to process,
then delete, some files. Since I was still "developing" the command, I was simply echo'ing the commands rather than
running them... here's what I ran...
ls -1 | xargs -I{} bash -c 'echo cat {} /usr/local/bin/catchmail.sh ; rm {}'
Do you see the problem?! So easy to do :( While I correctly echo'ed the first part of the
Bash command, I also needed another echo in front of the
rm... without it, the
not-so-dry run went ahead an deleted all my files, without first
processing them!! I guess in my mind, I'd carelessly assumed that the full Bash echo'd since it's enclosed within
single-quotes... oops! One must be extra careful when executing bash -c commands :(
Ah well, now I'm in the process of exporting the lost data from another source, in preparation of re-processing.
Oh, and I've added the above files to our daily backup scripts too.