There you are, happily playing around with an audio file you've spent all afternoon tweaking, and you're thinking, "Wow, doesn't it sound great? Lemme just move it over here." At that point your subconscious chimes in, "Um, you meant mv , not rm , right?" Oops. I feel your pain -- this happens to everyone. But there's a straightforward method to recover your lost file, and since it works on every standard Linux system, everyone ought to know how to do it. Briefly, a file as it appears somewhere on a Linux filesystem is actually just a link to an inode , which contains all of the file's properties, such as permissions and ownership, as well as the addresses of the data blocks where the file's content is stored on disk. When you rm a file, you're removing the link that points to its inode, but not the inode itself; other processes (such as your audio player) might still have it open. It's only after they're through and all link...