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
      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.