Is there some order of operations to rm? I performed rm on a large directory and am curious where I should look to see what might have been deleted. Does rm work on files first, then directories? Or is it based on some information in the inode table?Specs: rm from GNU coreutils 8.22system: Arch Linux running on a beagleboneblackfilesystem operating on was an external Seagate HDD (ext4) using USB 2.0.Backstory:I was performing some directory cleanup and performedcp -r A/ B/ C/ Dest/Unwittingly, I followed that up with rm -r A/ B/ C/ Dest/when I meant to simply perform rm -r A/ B/ C/I caught this and hit Ctrl+C before too long had passed. Specifically, it was < 3 seconds as I was using the time command in conjunction with rm & cp.  I went in and examined Dest/ expecting it to be non-existent, but lo and behold it was whole and appeared to not be affected. This is a bit surprising as A/ B/ C/ were quite small. Maybe 100200MB total. Dest/ however, is just shy of 1TB. Performing an ls on Dest/ showed that there were both files and directories at both ends of the alphabet (e.g. AFile.txt .... .... Zoo.txt). Did I get lucky and cancelled the rm before it wrought havoc on my Dest/ directory? Is rm really that slow (thankfully!)? If not, how does rm go about recursively removing things such that I can guess what might have been lost?I'm not really expecting to recover what I might have lost, just curious what potentially was blown away.
How does rm -r go about recursively removing? In what order?
rm;recursive