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.
Running the right command on the wrong SSH session/machine.
Tried to use Manjaro at some point. What a horrible distribution.
Works amazing for me for a long time. I don’t think it classifies as a foot gun.
Same here, and I’ve enjoyed it more than my Debian experience.
$ grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.conf
Thaaat… took me a stupid amount of time to fix.
There’s nothing wrong with that command, per se. You must’ve ducked up something else?
It’s grub.cfg not grub.conf. it’s really easy to miss because everything else is .conf.
Oh shit that’s right, totally missed that! :D
Me too, including when ferociously trying to debug why grub wouldn’t find a freaking bootable anything. The error message isn’t “uh, no config bro” but “hey, nothing to boot here, see ya in The Shell”. Argh.
Yeah, it has definitely caught me off guard a couple of times when installing Arch. At that stage if there’s no grub it didn’t install or the ESP flag isn’t set on EFI. If there is grub but no options it’s usually the config.
One time it was because I forgot to install the kernel, it took me a while to figure that one out.
Started to DBAN (destroy) internal drive instead of external drive.
I wonder of there is a physical equivalent to this. Imagine shreading the wrong drive.
In some cases holes are drilled through drives so they can’t recovered or, more efficiently, they are degaussed with large magnets.
Some e-waste processors degauss as a standard practice to limit their liability before the hardware is passed on.
Mounted root to a game folder on home and
sudo rm -rf ~/games/*because I accidentally copied the home folder into the games subvol which turned out to be the root subvol. Thanks btrfs!BTRFS: yo dawg, we heard you like partitions, so we put partitions in your partitions, so you can mount it inside your mounts.
Everyone here is talking about rm, but when’s the last time you dd’ed the wrong thing by accident?
You can get tripped up by tab completion, hda vs sda, sda vs sdb, flipping the articles around, he’ll, I’ve even blasted a good drive with /dev/random because I did t pay attention to what computer I’m logged into.
My killer app for multiple terminals open at once, weather through several ttys, xterms, tmux or the other one I don’t use was to type out my dd commands with a ls or something safe making in front of it while I look back and forth compulsively to verify that all the targets are correct.
