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.

  • ReCursing
    21•7 months ago

    Way back when I was just beginning to experiment with Linux back in the 90s I installed ZipSlack, which was a GUIless 100MB distro based on Slackware that ran from a folder on Windows. It was okay but I couldn’t really do much with it and back then 100MB was a chunk of space, so i went to delete it. But i thought I would give it one last hurrah by deleting it from Linux. So I made use of the infamous rm -rf and sat there thinking “this is taking a long time”… then realised I had my Windows drive mounted as a sub folder and I was in the process of wiping my hard drive of everything!