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 ${HOME}/projects folder has been deleted like… just now, and I have no idea how it happened. I may have a terrible new story to add if I figure it out.
dir="$(something that ultimately resolved to "")" rm -r $dir/*on a company server
I also once completely destroyed the data in a db that wasn’t backed up for that same company while trying to restore from a dump (which was deleted as part of the script i was running).
Luckily both of these mistakes happened on staging servers so no one really cared. (prod is backed up though so if i did it there, not that i have access to prod, it also wouldn’t be catastrophic)