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.

  • Possibly linux
    link
    fedilink
    English
    2
    edit-2
    7 months ago

    I wonder of there is a physical equivalent to this. Imagine shreading the wrong drive.

    • @markstos
      link
      27 months ago

      In some cases holes are drilled through drives so they can’t recovered or, more efficiently, they are degaussed with large magnets.

      Some e-waste processors degauss as a standard practice to limit their liability before the hardware is passed on.