source ~/.bash_history

deleted by creator

Many many years ago I wanted to clean up my freshly installed Slackware system by removing old files.

find / -mtime +30 -exec rm -f {};

Bad idea.

Not me, but one I saw… dude used chmod to lock down permissions across the board… including root… including the chmod command.

“What do I do?”

🤔

“Re-install?”

Tried to convert Ubuntu to Debian by replacing the repos in sources.list and apt dist-upgrading. 💣 Teenagers…

One that I can remember many years ago, classic trying to do something on a flash drive and dd my main hdd instead.

Funny thing, since this was a 5400rpm and noticed relatively quick (say 1-2 minutes), I could ctrl-c the dd, make a backup of most of my personal files (being very careful not to reboot) and after that I could safely reformat and reinstall.

To this day it amazes me how linux managed to not crash with a half broken root file system (I mean, sure, things were crashing right and left, but given the situation, having enough to back up most things was like magic)

sudo rm -f /lib /usr/share/backup/blah blah.tar.gz

Note the space.

First, the classical typo in a bash script:

set FOLDER=/some/folder

rm -rf ${FODLER}/

which is why I like to add a set -u at the begining of a script.

The second one is not with a Linux box but a mainframe running AIX:

If on Linux killall java kills all java processes, on AIX it just ignore the arguments and kill all processes that the user can kill. Adios the CICS region 😬 (on the test env. thankfully)

I thoroughly backup up my slow nvme before installing a new faster one. I actually didn’t even want to reuse the installation, just the files at /home.

So I mounted it at /mnt/backupnvme0n1, 2, etc and rsynced

The first few dry runs showed a lot of data was redundant, so I geniously thought “wow I should delete some of these”. And that’s when I did a classic sudo rm -rf in the /mnt root folder instead of /mnt/dirthathadthoseredundantfiles

I can’t even remember how I did this, but overwriting the partition table on the main production server at our small startup (back when “the server” would usually live on the premises of the startup). I remember my boss starting to hyperventilate from panic while I reconstructed it from memory / notes, and all the filesystems came back and he calmed down.

Same job, they gave me a little embedded-systems unit for me to use to build a prototype on. I hooked it up, nothing worked. I brought it back to them.

Hey, this one doesn’t work.

Huh… that’s weird, it was working before. Did you break it?

I don’t think so. Can I have one that works?

They literally told me, as they were handing me the second one: Okay, here’s another one. Don’t break it.

I figured it out literally seconds after breaking the second one… I was hooking it up to 12 volts of power when it needed 5. Second dead computer. Explaining that and that I needed a third one now was fun.

CTRL-C-ing apt because it looked stuck for more than 10 minutes. I don’t recommend doing it.

Not quite catastrophic but:

I’m in the process of switching my main server over from windows to Linux

I went with Deb 12 and it all works smoothly but I don’t have enough room to back up data to change the drive formats so they’re still NTFS. I was looking at my main media HDD and thought “oh, I’ll at least delete those windows partitions and leave the main partition intact.”

I found out the hard way that NTFS partitions can’t just reclaim space like that. It shuffles all the data when you change the partition. It’s currently 23 hours into the job and it’s 33% done.

I did this to reclaim 30 MB of space on a 14 TB drive.

Tinkering is all fun and games, until it’s 4 am, your vision is blurry, and thinking straight becomes a non-option, or perhaps you just get overly confident, type something and press enter before considering the consequences of the command you’re about to execute… And then all you have is a kernel panic and one thought bouncing in your head: “damn, what did I expect to happen?”.

Nah, that’s when the fun really starts! ;)

The package refused to either work or install complaining that the version of glibc was incorrect… So, I installed glibc from Debian’s repos.

:D That one is a classic. Most distributions don’t include packagers from other distros because 99% of the time it’s a bad idea. But with Arch you can do whatever you want, of course

My two things:

• I’ve heard about some new coreutils (rm, cp, cat… this time the name really fits the contents :D) and I decided to test it out. Of course it was conflicting with my current coreutils package and I couldn’t just replace it because deleting the old package would break requirements. So without thinking I forced the package manager to delete it “I’ll install a new one in just a second”. Turns out it’s hard to install a package without cp, etc :D
• I don’t remember what I was doing but I overwrote the first bytes of hdd. Meaning my partition table disappeared. Nothing could be mounted, no partitions found. Seemingly a brick.
  Turns out, if you run a rescue iso, ask it to try and recognize partitions and recreate the table without formatting, Linux will come back to life as if nothing happened

Found out the hard way that if you edit /etc/sudoers with anything other than visudo you best be absolutely sure the syntax is correct, otherwise sudo will refuse to read it and you’ll be locked out.

Also learned to add -rf to the rm command at the end, after I re-read it to make sure it does what it should do. Something like rm /path -rf instead of rm -fr /path. That protects you from your fat fingers hitting the enter key half way through.

fstab bind mount for /home that I misspelled, so I couldn’t login as myself.

fstab external hdd mount that didn’t have ignore flag so PC would pop if I booted while unplugged

Accidentally booting windows after a year and it overwrite my EFI boot entry.

The best I’ve see however was an acquaintance who accidentally set perms to own user on /usr/bin

So everything went from root:root to user:user which removed all the SUID/SGID bits as well so a bunch of bins broke lol.

Believe it or not, it was actually fairly easy to fix with chmod and chown