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What're some of the dumbest things you've done to yourself in Linux? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[-] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago

I installed timeshift to have a way to create restore points just in case I mess something up while fiddling with my Archbox.

I used it for a while before I decided to remove it. After that, I realized it didn't remove the "restore points" (I didn't fully understand how it worked) and thought it would be good idea to rm -rf /run/timeshift.

My whole /home was smited (it uses symlinks to create these "restore points"). Before I realized, it removed gigabytes of data.

Lesson learned: always understand how something works and always be careful when using rm -rf.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Best advice when using rm -rf
Don't.

[-] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Nice.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

thanks

this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024

262 points (97.8% liked)

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