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.

  • The Bard in GreenAEnglish
    6•7 months ago

    Typed “rm -r” in “/home/myuser” instead of “/home/myuser/Documents/ThingINoLongerNeed”

    Used gparted to wipe and format the device mounted at “/” instead of the external drive I meant to reformat. I’ve done this one TWO WHOLE TIMES in my life, three if you count wiping a device that was mounted at “/home/myuser/MyTwoTBDrive4DocsPicsMusicGamesEtc”.