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.

  • @jyte
    12•8 months ago
    • apt something that ended up removing sudo. No more admin rights.
    • used rsync to backup pretty much everything in / , with remove source option…
    • find with -delete option miss positioned. It deleted stuff before finding matching pattern
    • chown / chmod on /bin and/or /usr/bin
    • Removed everything in /etc
    • @[email protected]
      3•8 months ago

      On the first point: isn’t it possible to just go su and reinstall sudo?

      Or does it not work with disabled root?

      • @jyte
        6•8 months ago

        It doesn’t work with root disabled.

        The way to fix this is to boot in bash recovery where you land a root shell. From there you can hopefully apt install sudo if deb file is still in cache. If not, you have to make network function without systemd for apt install to work. Or, you can get sudo deb file and all missing dependencies from usb stick and apt install them from fs. Or just enable root, give it a password and reboot so you can su - and apt install sudo