What're some of the dumbest things you've done to yourself in Linux?
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.
I installed timeshift to have a way to create restore points just in case I mess something up while fiddling with my Archbox.
I used it for a while before I decided to remove it. After that, I realized it didn't remove the "restore points" (I didn't fully understand how it worked) and thought it would be good idea to rm -rf /run/timeshift.
My whole /home was smited (it uses symlinks to create these "restore points"). Before I realized, it removed gigabytes of data.
Lesson learned: always understand how something works and always be careful when using rm -rf.