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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I have a faint memory of once uninstalling python2 on an Ubuntu system trying to switch to python3. That was a fun learning moment.
Due to some poorly placed quotes, I managed to create a subdirectory named
~in my home folder. You can imagine what happened next. Luckily, I had just gotten my backup system up and running the day before, so nothing was lost.Smh I’ve never done anything really stupid with my system or at least I don’t remember it
Don’t worry, also you will get a chance to learn… It’ll be fun!
What do you mean? Only absolute skill issue noobs do stupid stuff with their systems (jk). Or maybe I’m so lucky because I never write any scripts and because of that never erase my /home idk
Renamed a drive mount folder, while it was mounted. Back in 1999 with big box Redhat 5.1, it said “okay!” And I lost all data on that drive. I was just learning Linux at the time, without an internet connection since the PCI winmodem I had didn’t work in Linux.
Tip: don’t put important things in just 1 place.
That aside!
Years ago when I first tried out Linux (I was around the age of 10), I didn’t really pay much attention while installing Linux back then, so I wiped my entire data disk D:…
I like the 3-2-1-1-0 backup rule personally.
tl;dr:
- 3 copies of your data
- on 2 different media
- at least 1 offsite copy
- 1 copy offline (preferably air-gapped)
- 0 errors (IE verified backups)
(For the super important stuff, obviously. I’m more lax about other things.)
I’m still stuck in vi
E37: No write since last change:!w /etc/fstabfirst!
Is that the “licking my own nose” emoticon?
rm *.cwhen I meantrm *.oMostly powering off my system when I shouldn’t have. I believe one time I began the process to format a drive I didn’t mean to and when I saw the process had started I pushed the power button and just made things worse. The other times were when I was updating.
This all happened when I first started using Linux.
Lmao, completely unrelated but back in the early 2000s, I played a lot of runescape. I got attacked by another player and pulled the power cord, smirking and thinking I successfully escaped. I didn’t lmao.
You know, you could have backups or better yet 3 copies on 2 mediums in 2 locations
Probably too late now lol, but you can totally recover deleted files if you don’t overwrite them. I recommend the System Rescue image, it has a lot of tools to deal with these things.
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Guix is such a terrible experience
Whoever decided that spaces would be allowed in filenames deserves whatever level of hell awaits them.
Spaces are fine in filenames. Just always always always quote your paths and/or variables…
Sounds great in theory, but when you are trying to use awk to print out commands that might have something like printf and have to start escaping quotes, it gets really messy really quick. I have run into situations like this more than I care to as I like writing commands that will write out other commands. Spaces in filenames also mess with things like sed or sort where you want a specific column. Sorry, but in my opinion using the same character that was previously determined to be a delimiter is just a bad idea.
Trying to add my user to wheel: sudo groupmod -a wheel Deleted my group membership in everything but wheel. That was fun! Remote system too! Edit: I still don’t remember the syntax. Geez.
Install Red Hat.
Kidding? Maybe.
