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.
aptsomething that ended up removingsudo. No more admin rights.- used
rsyncto backup pretty much everything in / , with remove source option… findwith-deleteoption miss positioned. It deleted stuff before finding matching patternchown/chmodon/binand/or/usr/bin- Removed everything in
/etc
The first one can be fixed by using
suNot if root account is disabled. Which is by default on Ubuntu and Debian . You’d need
sudo su -but well… No sudo left you know.Damn



