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.

  • theroff
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    8 months ago

    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:

    Clone NTFS on /dev/hda1 to /dev/hdc1: ntfsclone --overwrite /dev/hdc1 /dev/hda1

    Moral of the story was to RTFM 😂

    • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net
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      7 months ago

      (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)