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.
Ha! I just did something like that. I thought I had “orphaned” BTRFS snapshots taking up space.
I opened a file explorer as root…I deleted this one that wasn’t listed.
Oh wait…“Writable snapshot”…? Oh…no.
Yeah suddenly no programs or anything worked. Sadly there was no snapshot restoring out of that one! (That I would be capable of, anyway!)
So yeah, I managed to deliberately bumble past several safeguards into the “I should know what I’m doing” area, and found a magical way to rm -rf / from the GUI, essentially. Wee!
Thankfully, /home was its own partition, so aside from minor inconveniences bringing .configs back over and other little tweaks I’d implemented, I have reinstalled OpenSUSE Tumbleweed leaner, meaner, and cleaner. ¯_(ツ)_/¯
ACTUALLY, glad I backed up /home before the reinstall because the first reinstall attempt failed and wiped it!
Backups, kids. They really are the difference between “Aw darn, live and learn.”…and complete heartbreaking despair.