I’m working on a some materials for a class wherein I’ll be teaching some young, wide-eyed Windows nerds about Linux and we’re including a section we’re calling “foot guns”. Basically it’s ways you might shoot yourself in the foot while meddling with your newfound Linux powers.
I’ve got the usual forgetting the . in lines like this:
$ rm -rf ./bin
As well as a bunch of other fun stories like that one time I mounted my Linux home folder into my Windows machine, forgot I did that, then deleted a parent folder.
You know, the war stories.
Tell me yours. I wanna share your mistakes so that they can learn from them.
Fun (?) side note: somehow, my entire ${HOME}/projects folder has been deleted like… just now, and I have no idea how it happened. I may have a terrible new story to add if I figure it out.
Switched to what i thought was an old install usb; it had a close enough directory list to what i expected that i then went ahead and rm -rf * the whole thing.
Turns out that was my / directory. I only noticed because things stopped loading from the drive into memory. Everything still running actually still worked for the most part.
Yes. That’s what allows Unix legends like this: https://www.ee.torontomu.ca/~elf/hack/recovery.html
Yeah, mine was pretty similar…
rm -rf / home/user/somedirI think I realized what was happening somewhere in /etc, and stopped it maybe in /lib. But this was before /bin was a symlink, and I was jumping distros pretty constantly, so I just reinstalled. It was also before Ubuntu popularized sudo, IIRC, so I was probably su’d.