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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113 points

Running the right command on the wrong SSH session/machine.

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40 points

This is the scariest comment I’ve read in this thread.

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5 points

Imagine that you’re using fqdns instead of ips…

I refuse to elaborate.

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24 points

I set a different background color on all my machines because of exactly this while using VNC/RDP

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9 points

this. after i set different zsh themes on my servers + my main machine i now know exactly what machine i’m running commands to

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2 points

Neat idea, I hope I’ll remember this when I’m setting up my next server.

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9 points
2 points

Me every single day

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