Recover a source file after it has been written on

Question

One of my friends had launched this command:

gcc -o source.c source

Instead of:

gcc -o source source.c

And now he has lost the code that he's been working on for few days. Is there a chance to recover the code?

It's a Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 4 (Nahant Update 1).

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

You can try "photorec", available for redhat which sometimles give some good results