this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
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Linux

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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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[–] jyte@lemmy.world 12 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (6 children)
  • apt something that ended up removing sudo. No more admin rights.
  • used rsync to backup pretty much everything in / , with remove source option...
  • find with -delete option miss positioned. It deleted stuff before finding matching pattern
  • chown / chmod on /bin and/or /usr/bin
  • Removed everything in /etc
[–] Andromxda@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 7 months ago (2 children)

The first one can be fixed by using su

[–] jyte@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Not 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.

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