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.

  • elmicha@feddit.de
    0·
    7 months ago

    Btw you can just use

    rm -rf bin

    So you can’t forget the dot or put a space between ./ or after the slash.

    My biggest fuckup that I can remember was when I ran out of disk space and thought that the /var directory contained only unimportant things that will be recreated automatically. Oops, bye bye rpm database.