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.
How I lost a Postgres database:
- Installed Postgres container without configuring a volume
- Made a mental note that I need to configure a volume
- After a few days of usage, restarted the container to configure the volume
- …
- Acceptance
Well, that’s a dumb Docker thing, not necessarily a dumb Linux mistake. You could’ve made the same mistake on Windows or MacOS when running Docker.
Technically, containers always run in Linux. (Even on windows/OS X; on those platforms docker runs a lightweight Linux VM that then runs your containers.)
And I wasn’t even using Docker.