What're some of the dumbest things you've done to yourself in Linux?

Daniel Quinn@lemmy.ca to Linux@lemmy.ml – 262 points –

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.

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How I lost a Postgres database:

  1. Installed Postgres container without configuring a volume
  2. Made a mental note that I need to configure a volume
  3. After a few days of usage, restarted the container to configure the volume
  4. ...
  5. Acceptance

Well, that's a dumb Docker thing, not necessarily a dumb Linux mistake. You could've made the same mistake on Windows or MacOS when running Docker.

Technically, containers always run in Linux. (Even on windows/OS X; on those platforms docker runs a lightweight Linux VM that then runs your containers.)

And I wasn't even using Docker.