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.

  • macniel@feddit.de
    15·
    7 months ago

    I distrohopped once and wanted to try OpenSuse Tumbleweed. Would have went really well if I didn’t by accident deleted all my partitions…

    I lost all of my curated music files I gathered over the span of the last 15 years.

    I’ll never get those back.

    • pipe01@programming.dev
      9·
      7 months ago

      Probably too late now lol, but you can totally recover deleted files if you don’t overwrite them. I recommend the System Rescue image, it has a lot of tools to deal with these things.