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.

  • mlg@lemmy.worldEnglish
    6·
    2 months ago

    I already posted this before but a friend did chmod -R user /usr/bin and broke every suid and guid bin including sudo lol.

    Personally have accidentally shadow deleted /home via an incorrect bind mount so I couldn’t log into my own user.

    • Archr@lemmy.world
      5·
      2 months ago

      I did something similar (that my professor still talks about in class as a cautionary tale)

      I ran chown -R user .* (intending to target all hidden files in the folder) and for people that don’t know .* also matches .. (.. was / in this case) which changed the permissions on all files on the system to that user, including sudo.

      We fixed it by mounting the root of the file system in a docker container which effectively gave us root.

      • circular@lemmy.mlEnglish
        4·
        2 months ago

        I’ve also been hit by .* matching ... First of all, I find this really really jarring. It makes sense and doesn’t at the same time. I also wonder how to properly only glob the hidden files but I’m too afraid to experiment.