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.
ntfsclone /dev/sdc /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb was a blank filesystem and /dev/sdc was my Windows filesystem.
ntfsclone man page
It ran for less than a second and didn’t take me long to figure out what happened. That’s the story of how I stopped using Windows.
Damn that’s the equivalent of going cold turkey.
I don’t use windows for close to 20 years so I didn’t need ntfsclone so far but do I read correctly the man page that only the source is specified as positional parameter? If so, shouldn’t you have to write
nftsclone —overwrite /dev/sdc /dev/sdb? It still can be misleading (given that mv uses two positional parameters so mv -f source destination would have done what you wanted) but a bit less cryptic?
Yeah, sorry it was a long time ago (like 10+ years) but I checked and it would’ve been the --overwrite arg.
The manpage for the older ntfsclone command has it:
Moral of the story was to RTFM 😂
(RTFM = Read the Fucking Manual)
Adding this because I only learned this acronym just last week, and wish to share the knowledge with anyone else like me)