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.

  • Corroded
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    52 months ago

    Mostly powering off my system when I shouldn’t have. I believe one time I began the process to format a drive I didn’t mean to and when I saw the process had started I pushed the power button and just made things worse. The other times were when I was updating.

    This all happened when I first started using Linux.

    • @Yuki
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      72 months ago

      Lmao, completely unrelated but back in the early 2000s, I played a lot of runescape. I got attacked by another player and pulled the power cord, smirking and thinking I successfully escaped. I didn’t lmao.