[csummers]

Been there, done that. I rm -rf'd a bunch of important files once, and at the time grep was giving me "memory exhausted" errors. I was able to use strings to grab all of the text of the disk, and then wade through the results with vim.

I guess this is a pretty common problem. The blog post I wrote about it in 2005 continues to be the most searched-for entry point on my site: http://csummers.com/2005/12/20/undelete-text-files-on-linux-...