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.

  • @[email protected]English
    5•2 months ago

    I wanted to upgrade my Ubuntu to a newer version, but I had to do it through the command line. During the upgrade it asked if I wanted to see the file changes or something, so I said yes for fun… I couldn’t get out of the menu, or rather I didn’t know how and seemed to be stuck halfway through the upgrade. I tried a bunch of keys and possible combinations including… Ctrl + X.

    So after quitting the terminal halfway through a system upgrade I tried to restore through backup. Turns out the backup was corrupted or something and didn’t work. I never realized because I never thought to test it. I lost a few years of photos and some music files that I’ve had probably for decades that I downloaded off Limewire. I still have the backup file in case it can be salvaged some day, but oh well. Most of the files I was able to download again off of the bay.

      • @[email protected]English
        2•2 months ago

        I suppose it is like a super zip file. I was using Ubuntu’s default backup (Deja Dup) which was just a gui for Duplicity. I was using the gui for everything but I suppose it didn’t work. I spent days running through all the command options for duplicity, but it never yielded any results. I still don’t really know what went wrong, but no matter.