I accidentally untarred archive intended to be extracted in root directory, which among others included some files for /etc directory.
I went on to rm -rv ~/etc, but I quickly typed rm -rv /etc instead, and hit enter, while using a root account.

  • frozen@lemmy.frozeninferno.xyz
    7·
    8 hours ago

    Reminds me of when I had a rogue ~ directory sitting in my own home directory (probably from a badly written script). Three seconds into rm -rf ~ and me wondering why it was taking so long to complete, I CTRL+C, reboot, and pray.

    Alas, it was a reinstall for me that day (good excuse to distro hop, anyway). Really glad I don’t mount my personal NAS folder in my home directory anymore, holy shit.

  • kertain@sh.itjust.works
    9·
    11 hours ago

    I am new to Linux and just getting somewhat comfortable as my daily driver, very proud of myself that I got the joke pretty quickly :)

    • wabasso@lemmy.caEnglish
      5·
      10 hours ago

      Ok speaking of this, where do a distro’s config and boot scripts even come from? Are they in a package? Like on Debian so the .debs have metadata that can add cron jobs and such?

  • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
    48·
    16 hours ago

    OOOOOOOOOOOF!!

    One trick I use, because I’m SUPER paranoid about this, is to mv things I intend to delete to /tmp, or make /tmp/trash or something.

    That way, I can move it back if I have a “WHAT HAVE I DONE!?” moment, or it just deletes itself upon reboot.

    • Alberat@lemmy.world
      7·
      12 hours ago

      i always do “read;rm ./file” which gives me a second to confirm and also makes it so i don’t accidentally execute it out of my bash history with control-r

      • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
        13·
        6 hours ago

        That’s certainly something you can do! I would personally follow the recommendation against aliasing rm though, either just using the trash tool’s auto complete or a different alias altogether.

        Reason being as someone mentioned below: You don’t want to give yourself a false sense of security or complacency with such a dangerous command, especially if you use multiple systems.

        I liken it to someone starting to handle weapons more carelessly because the one they have at home is “never loaded.” Better safe than sorry.

        Lol we should have “rules of rm safety”:

        • Assume rm is always sudo unless proven otherwise.
        • (EDIT)Finger should be off the Enter key until you are certain you are ready to delete.
        • Never point rm at something you aren’t willing to permanently destroy.
        • Always be aware of your target directory, and what is recursively behind it!
        • Sylveon@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          3·
          5 hours ago

          I think this is the best approach. I’ve created a short alias for my trash tool and also aliased rm to do nothing except print a warning. This way you train yourself to avoid using it. And if I really need it for some reason I can just type \rm.

          If you want to train yourself even more effectively you can also alias rm to run sl instead :)

      • I Cast Fist
        5·
        14 hours ago

        After being bitten by rm a few times, the impulse rises to alias the rm command so that it does an “rm -i” or, better yet, to replace the rm command with a program that moves the files to be deleted to a special hidden directory, such as ~/.deleted. These tricks lull innocent users into a false sense of security.

  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip
    8·
    12 hours ago

    Yeah, same thing like with unclosed bottles, cup too close to the table edge, etc.: Accidents that can hapen, will happen.
    Better name them something else in your user dir.

    And yes, painful experience.

  • thespcicifcocean@lemmy.world
    7·
    14 hours ago

    Ohohoho man did you ever fuck up. I did that once too. I can’t remember how I fixed it. I think I had to reinstall the whole OS

  • WatchfulConsole@sh.itjust.works
    3·
    11 hours ago

    I’ve had a combination of tab complete and filename spaces lead to things like rm Some\ Common\ Prefix * at least three times. Instant regret. I’ve now got a pretty good intuitive reflex around this type of thing. You eventually get enough callouses.

  • dunz@feddit.nu
    16·
    17 hours ago

    Be happy that you didn’t remeber the ~ and put a space between it and etc😃.

    • WatchfulConsole@sh.itjust.works
      2·
      11 hours ago

      I’ll provide some cover. This is my current home directory: bin/ bmp/ cam/ doc/ eot/ hhc/ img/ iso/ mix/ mku/ mod/ mtv/ mus/ pkg/ run/ src/ tmp/ vid/ zim/. It’s your home directory, enjoy it however you like.

    • underscores@lemmy.zipEnglish
      502·
      1 day ago

      I agree with this take, don’t wanna blame the victim but there’s a lesson to be learned.

      • neatchee@piefed.socialEnglish
        571·
        1 day ago

        except if you read the accompanying text they already stated the issue by accidentally unpacking an archive to their user directory that was intended for the root directory. that’s how they got an etc dir in their user directory in the first place

        • ThanksForAllTheFish@sh.itjust.works
          23·
          20 hours ago

          Could make one archive intended to be unpacked from /etc/ and one archive that’s intended to be unpacked from /home/Alice/ , that way they wouldn’t need to be root for the user bit, and there would never be an etc directory to delete. And if they run tar test (t) and pwd first, they could check the intended actions were correct before running the full tar. Some tools can be dangerous, so the user should be aware, and have safety measures.

          • neatchee@piefed.socialEnglish
            8·
            18 hours ago

            they acquired a tar package from somewhere else. the instructions said to extract it to the root directory (because of its file structure). they accidentally extracted it to their home dir

            that is how this happened. not anything like what you were saying

    • Ephera@lemmy.mlEnglish
      7·
      1 day ago

      [OP] accidentally untarred archive intended to be extracted in root directory, which among others included some files for /etc directory.

    • palordrolap@fedia.io
      7·
      1 day ago

      I dunno, ~/bin is a fairly common thing in my experience, not that it ends up containing many actual binaries. (The system started it, miss, honest. A quarter of the things in my system’s /bin are text based.)

      ~/etc is seriously weird though. Never seen that before. On Debians, most of the user copies of things in /etc usually end up under ~/.local/ or at ~/.filenamehere

        • palordrolap@fedia.io
          2·
          15 hours ago

          ~/bin is the old-school location from before .local became a thing, and some of us have stuck to that ancient habit.

      • db2@lemmy.world
        2·
        1 day ago

        I use ~/config/* to put directories named the same as system ones. I got used to it in BeOS and brought it to LFS when I finally accepted BeOS wasn’t doing what I needed anymore, kept doing it ever since.

    • vapeloki@lemmy.world
      13·
      1 day ago

      So, you don’t do backups of /etc? Or parts of it?

      I have those tars dir ssh, pam, and portage for Gentoo systems. Quickset way to set stuff up.

      And before you start whining about ansible or puppet or what, I need those maybe 3-4 times a year to set up a temporary hardened system.

      But may, just maybe, don’t assume everyone is a fucking moron or has no idea.

      Edit Or just read what op did, I think that is pretty much the same

      • FauxLiving@lemmy.world
        2·
        20 hours ago

        But may, just maybe, don’t assume everyone is a fucking moron or has no idea.

        Well, OP didn’t say they used Arch, btw so it’s safe to assume.

        (I hate that this needs a /s)