What is $Recycle.Bin in LS output?

If i do LS and see

$RECYCLE.BIN

and try to TAB complete $R

I get

$RANDOM

clearly I am an idiot, but breaking things is how I learn :)

I deleted $RECYCLE.BIN and lost a bunch of files.

Now testdisk is recovering into

$RJNUMBERSANDLETTERS folders

I can't CD into them to test if the file integrity which I want to do before letting it finish recovering for 20 plus hours.

Is this because the folder was originally deleted on the HD and is stored in $RHASD etc etc?

I don't expect all files to be in $RASD format, I think it is recovering files from previos deletion. IE: These files were all ready gone when I deleted $RECYCLE.BIN.

But also for prosterities sake of the internet

What does $FOLDER represent?

Note: I think this might be ntfs related? My ExtHD's are NTFS my Interal HD's are Ext4

1 Answer

You need to escape the $ when passing it to the ls command in the terminal, as $ is a special character used for referencing environment variables in the shell.

Running ls \$RECYCLE.BIN will list the contents of that folder, or only that file, depending on which it is. As for the $RECYCLE.BIN directory itself, it is a special directory on NTFS partitions, if you move files to Recycle Bin in Windows, they end up in that directory on the partition, until you empty the Recycle Bin.