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.

  • bionicjoey
    10·
    8 months ago

    Not me but a colleague of mine wrote a bash script that had something like this and ran it on a server:

    FOO="/home/bar"

... Many lines later ...

rm -rf $FOOT/*

    Reminder that bash will resolve uninitiated variables to the empty string.

    Luckily he halted the process after it had only nuked /boot and /bin. If it had gotten to /var and the mounted data storage within, we would have been in trouble