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.
I have made countless mistakes since the 90s, mostly involving rm. The most recent one was yesterday when I was trying to rm files in a directory with lots of other unrelated files.
I don’t remember the exact failure, but I was shooting for something like
rm *lngand typo’edrm *;ng(those chars are next to each other on the kb). This happily rm’ed * (d’oh!) then errored on the nonexistance ng. :-(Yeah at this point I’ve aliased ‘rm’ to nothing and exclusively use ‘trash’.
In the past I’ve aliased rm to a wrapper that showed PWD and the files to be affected, slept a couple seconds in case I wanted to abort, then shredded smaller files, rm’ed big files, or placed in a Trash dir for certain kinds of files (.conf, .cfg, etc).
I might try to find or rewrite it.
That sounds great but I don’t want to keep the ‘rm’ muscle memory in case I’m on another computer and delete something important. Having to use ‘trash’ instead makes you more conscious when it errors out.
Dude, test those things with an echo command first.