this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2024
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Linux

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So I was thinking of silly things I've done that pseudo-broke my system, or made me think I had a broken system. Like the time I put the cmd :

exit

in my ~/.bash_aliases file and I had to open a text editor to fix it because that broke all the terminals on my machine.

I'm curious what other silly things users have done to confuse themselves.

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[–] christophski@feddit.uk 8 points 4 hours ago

Just the other day I tried to remove pipewire from my system but didn't look at the list of packages to be removed... Turns out it removed gnome desktop and so booted into CLI 🤦‍♀️

[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 5 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago)

I wanted to reinstall my Gentoo system. A SUSE (back before OpenSUSE) disc was the newest distro I had lying around. I thought it shouldn't matter from which system I do the install, Gentoo won't care.

So I repartitioned /dev/hda, installed the base system and went to set up my mount points. Only to discover that my data drive was gone. Stupid SUSE labeled the drives differently. /dev/hdb was my old system drive and I had repartitioned my old data drive.

Taught me to really check which drive was which. I wouldn't touch SUSE again for decades because of this.

[–] ma1w4re@lemm.ee 5 points 6 hours ago (2 children)

I made alias q=exit for some reason and now I accidentally close the terminal when I press ;q and enter 😭

[–] GolfNovemberUniform@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 hours ago

Why would you type ; in a terminal though? Are you using it as a code editor?

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 2 points 5 hours ago

God bless your innocent soul.

[–] thingsiplay@beehaw.org 5 points 6 hours ago

Short: I forgot the /etc/fstab mount entry

I'm not sure if the following counts as stupid, but here is one where I almost wiped my system and reinstalled everything. I have some entries in the /etc/fstab to bind certain directories to specific locations in my home, to keep it modular (doing this since over 10 years). One day I replaced one of the internal harddrives and then the system would no longer boot up, because the it tries to mount a non existent drive.

Due to my long years of experience and wisdom with Linux, I thought that either the new drive was broken or I something from my body sparked over the board. It took me several minutes until I realized what actually happened and then everything was fine.

BTW in EndeavourOS when this happens again (and it did) then while boot the system asks me to ignore that entry and continue. Which is soooo useful and don't know why this was never asked before (before I was on EndeavourOS).

[–] mactan@lemmy.ml 5 points 8 hours ago

I set up a cron task and it was meant to do a super scuffed sendmail if there was a problem, there was about 20GB on the spool before I noticed and the pi's SD card was full