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

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

I wanted to try inserting and removing kernel modules, so I looked around and thought "well, I don't have a USB stick in right now so I can safely try removing the usb kernel module." So I did that, and after pressing enter I realized my keyboard is connected with USB.

1. have an nvidia GPU

2. have Fedora

3. download RPM package of drivers for Red Hat (after all, Fedora and Red Hat are... compatible, right?)

4. Everything goes fine

5. Six months later, upgrade to a new version of Fedora

6. oops, kernel panic at boot after the upgrade, and no video to troubleshoot after UEFI boot

7. figure out how to boot into a recovery partition from UEFI

8. figure out how to enable a serial console over a USB device

9. figure out how to connect to the serial console from another computer using another USB device

10. figure out what the kernel panic is from (not the upgrade, but the driver which wasn't upgraded)

11. figure out how to uninstall the incorrectly installed driver

12. figure out how to install the correct driver

That was a fun three week OS upgrade.

I tried to install an OS to a USB stick. This is Kubuntu specific.

You need to create a GPT partition on the stick, then you should be able to just use the installer and install on another USB stick.

I went through it, selected the usb stick... was not sure if everything was right and went a menu back, was correct, went forth again, past the install target selection and installed.

Well... turns out the Kubuntu installer (Calamares) selects the first disk always. And that selection seems to reset to default when going a menu back....

I deleted my complete normal disk, with like everything I had.

No Backup no mercy. Luckily did one only a few weeks before. The first since half a year! Damn... had my uni stuff on Nextcloud, a lot of personal stuff synced to my phone with syncthing.

rm *.c when I meant rm *.o

ntfsclone /dev/sdc /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb was a blank filesystem and /dev/sdc was my Windows filesystem.

ntfsclone man page

It ran for less than a second and didn't take me long to figure out what happened. That's the story of how I stopped using Windows.

If you count Android too, then this: I got my first Android phone when I was 10 or 11 and rooted it on the first day of having it. This was during a time when we were all still using ClockworkMod because TWRP didn't exist yet, and I somehow ended up with a system without a kernel. Panic ensued, and I spent that entire night (like 10 hours) digging through xda in order to find a tutorial on how to get this damn phone to run again. Imagine having to tell your parents "I broke my phone I got yesterday." I did get it working at like 6:30 AM. Fun times.

An older friend of mine told me years back about an incident that happened on a university VAX running Unix. In those days, everyone was using vt100 terminals, and the disk drives weren't all that quick. He was working on his own terminal when without warning, he got this error when trying to run a common command (e.g. ls)

$ ls -l
sh: ls: command not found

So he went on over to the system admin's office, where he found the sysadmin and his assistant, staring at their terminal in frozen horror. Their screen had something like:

# rm -rf / tmp/*.log
^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C^C
# ls -l
sh: ls: command not found
# stat /bin/ls
sh: stat: command not found

A few seconds after hitting return, and the rm command not finishing immediately, he realised about the errant space, and then madly hammered Ctrl-C to try to stop it. It turns out that the disk was slow enough that not everything was lost, and by careful use of the commands that hadn't been deleted, managed to copy the executables off another server without having to reinstall the OS.

I totally pulled a LTT and removed my kernel. >_< There was a "real time" kernel listed in apt, and I installed it because I was curious if it would reduce lock latency for a project I was working on. (I wasn't trying to solve a problem, just curious) It didn't and I figured it was probably a bad idea to leave it installed. So I did an apt remove, and the rest went something like this.

Apt: Are you sure you want to remove the your kernel? Y/N

Me: Oh jeez... I don't want to do that.

Motor Memory: Y <return>

Apt: Are you really really sure? Your computer will not boot if you do this. Y/N

Me: Oh, crap! That's not what I meant to do. Definitely not!

Motor Memory: Y <return>

Me: No! Why would my brain betray me!?

Fortunately this was on a PopOS machine, so I booted into the recovery partition. Even if fixing it only took a minute, I still felt very very dumb. >_<

The dumbest must have been when I went through the list of installed packages on Debian and removed everything named "python-..." since I don't program in python.

I’m still stuck in vi

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.

Way back when I was just beginning to experiment with Linux back in the 90s I installed ZipSlack, which was a GUIless 100MB distro based on Slackware that ran from a folder on Windows. It was okay but I couldn't really do much with it and back then 100MB was a chunk of space, so i went to delete it. But i thought I would give it one last hurrah by deleting it from Linux. So I made use of the infamous rm -rf and sat there thinking "this is taking a long time"... then realised I had my Windows drive mounted as a sub folder and I was in the process of wiping my hard drive of everything!

I once removed all groups from my user by using usermod -g instead of usermod -G

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

I once tried to restore replication on a broken MySQL cluster by restoring the backup on the only good, running node.

Reformatted windows and installed Linux.

Wait before the hate. This was the first time I did it and knew nothing about it and didn't know it would wipe my system. So I lost everything.

I have a faint memory of once uninstalling python2 on an Ubuntu system trying to switch to python3. That was a fun learning moment.

Trusting tab-completion and pressing enter just a tiny bit too early, resulting in overwriting the work of at least four hours, because the files' names started the same. That whilst trying to initiate a git repository to prevent that kind of mistake....

You know, I'm in a constant battle with bootloaders. I've both deleted grub multiple times and windows boot manager by accident and by believing "I could fix it by re-generating it"... More like re-installing.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda status=progress

hmm why is it so fast

OH

CTRL-C

and then a kernel panic yeah my fs was gone

Deleted the certs from the sshd daemon which locked me out of a remote server that required and a 2 hour drive to fix.

Not me, and not Linux, but a school mate found the following bash snippet online :(){ :|:& };:.

Naturally, he tried it on the SunOS servers we had access to for schoolwork. He got his account suspended for the rest of the year.

I think most Linux distros are configured to kill fork bombs nowadays.

I do dumb things like edit my network configuration do some stuff and log out. Then I can't login the next weekend because the IP address is wrong. Also:

Ifconfig eth0 down

And I am booted from ssh.

"I have 200 GB of unused space in the windows partition, I'll just plug a live CD, divide that partition and merge it with the Linux one, ggez"

Yes, dividing the windows partition destroyed it. Yes, mixing the windows and ext destroyed Linux. I might have been able to recover something but I was like 18 and I just reinstalled windows in a fit of misdirected anger against Linux.

Always do an echo first before you put rm in a script. You know the story.

I distrohopped once and wanted to try OpenSuse Tumbleweed. Would have went really well if I didn't by accident deleted all my partitions...

I lost all of my curated music files I gathered over the span of the last 15 years.

I'll never get those back.

Due to some poorly placed quotes, I managed to create a subdirectory named ~ in my home folder. You can imagine what happened next. Luckily, I had just gotten my backup system up and running the day before, so nothing was lost.

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.

I accidentally overwrote /etc/passwd once and I allowed /boot to run out of space during a kernal update and I created a local user with the same user that was also on the realm/domain that I had joined and various bash script issues.
Some stuff I've had to fix that someone else did:

• named a file rm -rf
• rm -rf /bin instead of ./bin -- Also the fact that they had sudo was crazy and also I guess this was the second time
• chmod -R 777 /
• Various software bugs running swap out of space or hitting the inode limit by creating files over and over again with a timestamp in the filename and having to remove all of them because there was no backup to the OS
• Someone disabled SELinux because something wasn't working but didn't tell anyone -- ugh
• Compiled java because they googled some issue and followed some old tutorial without understanding anything instead of using alternatives and symlinked the old java from /bin to /home/theiruser/java -- had sudo because he was a Windows domain admin.
• Cybersecurity guy didn't know what some VMs did so he turned them off and figured he'd find out if/when someone complained. Caused a massive core services outage.
• Same Cybersecurity guy deleted a bunch of data because he wanted to see how the sysadmins would respond and witness backup restorations. He did not inform anyone.
• Cybersecurity guy above still has Domain Admin and sudo everywhere. I would have personally removed his privileged access regardless of what 'CyberSecurity' management thought but I was leaving for a new job by then anyway so I figured I'd just let them eventually lie in the bed they made.

There's more but I don't want to keep going because it is Sunday and I don't want to ruin it.

Trying to solve any Linux problem via ...

_{Anti Commercial-AI license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)}

My first experience with installing Linux on a hard drive involved wiping the wrong hard drive (my dad’s) and installing on it. Then panicking when Windows 95 didn’t boot up. Thank goodness my dad was understanding lol.

I updated a manjaro system.

I mounted a disk of a server in rescue mode, since I needed to extract everything (the provider didn't have the option to dump everything as a zip). Then installed an FTP server, added a user/pass, it worked.

But I couldn't access the files of the original disk, even though I could see them. So I just chgrp/chown the original files, since the disk was just "mounted" in the rescue disk /mnt, I thought it was alright (at the time I thought permissions were volatile, stored separately from the files). I could now download the entire disk, yay!

Upon booting the original disk again, a bunch of errors: shell not starting, tools not running, because they were owned by user and not root...

Well we reinstalled all the server from scratch that day.

Tip: don't put important things in just 1 place.

That aside!

Years ago when I first tried out Linux (I was around the age of 10), I didn't really pay much attention while installing Linux back then, so I wiped my entire data disk D:...

i accidentally mark iwd as dependency rather than explicit. after that someday im removing a package depends on iwd, iwd itself been removed as a dependency as well. and im been blocked out of my remote machine until someday i have physical acces to it

Wiping out Windows trying to install Linux seems to be a common thing. Did that while trying to install Ubuntu as a teen.
Funnily, I didn't check which Ubuntu iso I downloaded and ended up installing Ubuntu server. I should've noticed with the gui-less installer, but then I thought that it was just Linux being hightech.

• apt something that ended up removing sudo. No more admin rights.
• used rsync to backup pretty much everything in / , with remove source option...
• find with -delete option miss positioned. It deleted stuff before finding matching pattern
• chown / chmod on /bin and/or /usr/bin
• Removed everything in /etc

Using sudo when it isn't necessary, and the real cannon: sudo su.. Adding sudo to your command lines indiscriminately causes files you create to be owned by root even though they are in your home directory, and then you end up using sudo to make changes to the files... and then the filesystem permissions cannot prevent you from successfully running an accidental "sudo rm -rf /" command.

Seriously... sudo is not a "habit" to develop in order to avoid dealing with filesystem permissions problems.

The Arch installation tutorial I followed originally advised using LVM to have separate root and user logical volumes. However, after some time my root volume started getting full, so I figured I would take 10GB off of my home volume and add it to the root one. Simple, right?

It turns out that lvreduce --size 10G volgroup0/lv_home doesn't reduce the size by 10GB, it sets the absolute size to 10GB, and since I had way more than 10GB in that volume, it corrupted my entire system.

There was a warning message, but it seems my past years of Windows use still have me trained to reflexively ignore dire warnings, and so I did it anyway.

Since then I have learned enough to know that I really don't do anything with LVM, nor do I see much benefit to separate root/home partitions for desktop Linux use, so I reinstalled my system without LVM the next time around. This is, to date, the first and only time I have irreparably broken my Linux install.

chmod'd all my home directory's files and folders recursively. First to 600, which prevented me from listing any folders, then to 700, which broke a few programs, then to 755, which broke ssh.

My biggest thing when switching to Linux was understanding why I didn't have permission to alter half of my file structure. I was trying to take ownership of my /usr directory as a user and had to have multiple people explain why that was a bad idea (and why simply making any changes as a super user via terminal was more than adequate for the results I wanted).

My mindset was a result of so many user files being spread across dozens of branches of the Windows file structure. Some very close to the root of the drive, some a few directories deeper. I didn't really understand the benefit of having all my stuff in /home (and am now a full convert. Just thinking about navigating a Windows drive makes my skin crawl now).

Mine falls along with the people who were distracted. Was doing two deployments for work on night and on one I need to clear a cache. As I was typing the cd command, I happened to glance at the instructions for the other deployment and for some reason my mind switched to the deployment folder. I then typed out rm -rf *, and as I hit return realized I wasn't in the cache subdir. Blew away our prod environment and it took hours to get it all restored. The restore kept asking the guy to go pull tape #xxx. It was nerve wracking because depending on the tape, there was a chance it was moved offsite. Got it all restored and turned it back on, and then had to start back from the beginning since the backup was from the night before. The other people doing deployments weren't too happy, but I owned up immediately and we ended up changing the procedure. First, the cache clearing was done via a script after that, and I won my argument about not having to do two deployments simultaneously!

I was setting up fail2ban on an sftp server at work.

Guess who got admin permanently banned from that machine.

Can't remember exactly what happened but it involved changing permissions on /bin /sbin and similar. You know for security ...

In the end I didn't have permissions to run chmod, su or sudo

Fortunately there is little that can't be fixed by booting from a live image.

For this very reason, I have aliased rm -rf with trash-cli

Not me but a colleague of mine wrote a bash script that had something like this and ran it on a server:

FOO="/home/bar"

... Many lines later ...

rm -rf $FOOT/*

Reminder that bash will resolve uninitiated variables to the empty string.

Luckily he halted the process after it had only nuked /boot and /bin. If it had gotten to /var and the mounted data storage within, we would have been in trouble

My buddy was in a class doing a programming test. It was a couple minutes until turn in time, so he went to zip up the source files. He had already ran the appropriate zip command previously, so he pressed up three times and then enter. It appears he had miscalculated, because the command that ran was rm *.c. There were no backups.

I once just uninstalled sudo and replaced it with doas. Turns out, the shutdown process needs sudo and a lot more. So I am still using my system since then, without shutting down.

No joking, I use Fedora Atomic and can not break my system... unless you mess up your dotfiles, and a lot more.

I also put a drive into my /etc/fstab once without the nofail argument.

No idea why that is not set by default, but when removing that drive my system couldnt boot and I exited to a very scary dracut shell.

$ grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.conf

Thaaat... took me a stupid amount of time to fix.

Force uninstalled glibc on my Gentoo, which basically broke every shell and binary on the system. Was able to repair in place because I

1. Had already compiled busybox statically
2. Still had a copy of the stage 3 tarball on / which I could use to 'restore' glibc libraries

Run sudo apt dist-upgrade -y right after an upgrade to the Kubuntu 24.04 beta on a semi production system.

This is right after the xz thing happened. Also while Ubuntu made the t64 migration (Replaced packages with a 32 time variable with a 64 bit one, the packages are renamed. E.g. lib2geom1.2.0 to lib2geom1.2.0t64)

Packages based on the compromised xz had been removed from the repositories, but I already had some newer ones installed which where dependent on them. Also they already wanted the packages with the t64 addition, which by now where nowhere present in the system.

So dist-upgrade did what it could to upgrade 5 packages and bring the system into a consistent state: It uninstalled half of the system including some somewhat essential packages.

I noticed one of them scrolling by and hit CTRL+C. Afterwards I had the choice of saving the data and restoring from a backup a few weeks ago, or to patch it up by hand. So I did the second and created transitional packages like an empty lib2geom1.2.0t64 which depends on lib2geom1.2.0 which was in the repositories back then. 20 of these later I could install packages to get the GUI somewhat working and now weeks later all the t64 migrations are back in the repos and the system is fully functional again :)

Lessons learned:

• Be very careful with dist-upgrade
• Manually trigger a backup before a release upgrade

In now upgrade with
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -yV && read -p "Flatpak Update? (yj/n): " choice && [[ $choice = [YyJj] ]] && sudo flatpak update --noninteractive
and equivs-build ( sudo apt install equivs) came in really handy in building the transitional packages fast.

I have a story that most of here might have faced. I ran dd on my external drive instead of my usb stick to create an iso. 1.8TB of data poof.

Was trying to get corectrl configured and I was blindly copying text to paste into config files.

Next thing I know, I can't get my system to boot up again. 🤣

Time to reinstall. Again. 😅

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)

I just finished doing a fresh install this morning, because my wifi card wasn't working. It honestly needed to be done anyway because I was out-of date, but the wifi card finally got me to back-up all my data and do it.

Fresh install, and wifi still won't even toggle-on. Was about to look for manual install of the driver, and so on and so forth... and then I noticed my folly

Fucking keyboard has a toggle switch to turn the wifi off. Not the worst and glad I didn't pull my hair out over it, but damn... felt pretty dumb this morning

I updated my graphics card. Twice. On two different systems. Nvidia sucks. Both times resulted in reinstalling Linux entirely.

I've deleted my DE a couple of times from not reading the "The following packages will be REMOVED"-list.

• Accidentally did a partial upgrade of Arch Linux in which I upgraded libssl but not systemd (which depended on it) (which refused to start becuase one of its dependencies had been upgraded to an incompatible version) (which caused the kernel to panic immediately on bootup because the init process died) (writing init=bash on the kernel command line gave me a shell but not network access) (i had to boot off a liveusb, chroot into my /, and run pacman -Syu from there in order to fix it)
• Use Ubuntu, at all, for anything, ever

was too incompetent to install arch one time so i used archinstaller and created a separate home partition. couple years later that root partiton's close to filled up, and i do an update after deleting come programs to free up space. then some weird text appeaerrs in terminal, and so i try to update again (this time specifically wine), says loads of files already exist in filesystem. i think "this is weird", so i restart.

what instantly gets my attention is this text greeting me on boot

loading Linux linux... error: file '/vmlinuz-linux' not found. Loading initial ramdisk... error: you need to load the kernel first.

Press any key to continue.

yup, i just borked my install, so i hastily whipped out an outdated arch USB, updated it using a spare laptop and am now on a reinstall (luckily i keep the important files on a separate drive, so not all is lost). extra insult to injury was that my previous install had my drive LUKS encrypted, so i couldn't evne get in there to possibly backup anything if i tried lol. but it's feels refreshing starting anew though.

There's a lot of gun refference in that school class. Are you by any chance in the US?

Once I omitted a semicolon after an “rm -rf”and the next command. The script was supposed to reduce downtime vs typing the commands manually, but instead it deleted the production site and the “.bak” backup of the site instantly.

Typed "rm -r" in "/home/myuser" instead of "/home/myuser/Documents/ThingINoLongerNeed"

Used gparted to wipe and format the device mounted at "/" instead of the external drive I meant to reformat. I've done this one TWO WHOLE TIMES in my life, three if you count wiping a device that was mounted at "/home/myuser/MyTwoTBDrive4DocsPicsMusicGamesEtc".

Let a narcisist bipolar family member onto my home server for phaseI. For phaseII I granted too much access in sudo because I was busy. Fast forward a year or two and a downswing triggers the victim rage and he attempts to wreck my server after a minor argument -- would have, too, if I wasn't keenly aware of a conversation he had a few weeks before where he detailed "how to fuck with someone horribly" to a peer and I used that recollection to reverse the damage. It was a lucky thing, and 25 years on I have better security and backup processes.

I still regret that. #family, right?

1. Have Nvidia card
2. Change the driver to see if I can fix a weird graphical issue I was having.
3. Rebooted computer and got stuck in boot loop because there was an error with the driver.

Wanted to customize GRUB and tried the GUI program. I wanted it to boot without delays unless a key is being held, and also add a "Shutdown" option (GRUB script halt), in case I open the laptop and didn't want it turned on. The edits looked alright in GRUB Customizer but I should not have made them both at once, because it made "Shutdown" the default option somehow, so the OS would never boot and holding none of the special keys worked. I failed to update or reinstall GRUB using a live USB and ended up having to reinstall the entire distro.

I once spent a month automating the production of repositories for each kernel version supported on our HPC and rested every step exhaustively in isolation.

When I was satisfied I ran it with root permissions and hosed the VMs it was running on because a recursive chmod evaluated to /.

Oops.

I already posted this before but a friend did chmod -R user /usr/bin and broke every suid and guid bin including sudo lol.

Personally have accidentally shadow deleted /home via an incorrect bind mount so I couldn't log into my own user.

Permanently Deleted

Adding a DENY ALL line to the top of iptables, getting disconnected, realizing that I'm fucking SSHing into this removed...

Thinking Android/Linux would behave anything resembling GNU/Linux

Removed and apt purge'd python2 package.

Pity debian folded in on itself and dpkg required it at the time for something so that wasn't an easy one.

Deleting my grub config instead of editing it. Fortunately that's pretty easy to recover from, just annoying.

F'ed up installing graphics driver and had to reset everything from another TTY, also just annoying.

Chose the wrong permissions or path on a chmod call and locked out a big party of the system. I think that was during a setup though, so I just started from scratch again.

Not too long ago, on a Slackware box I needed to manually change glibc to another version. No problem, I thought, just remove the version that's there and install the package for the version I needed. So removepkg glibc and then immediately dawned on me.... oh wait I really didn't want to do that... Of course, after that installpkg and pretty much everything else was broken since pretty much everything either depends on glibc, or has a dependency that depends on glibc, so I couldn't install the new package or do pretty much anything other than smack my forehead.

Wasn't actually too big of a deal to fix. Used another computer to create a bootable USB stick with the Slackware installer, booted the computer with the USB stick, and did some chroot trickery to reinstall the old glibc package again. Then booted it back up normally and used upgradepkg to change glibc like I should have in the first place.

Today I did rsync backwards. I just restored the backup and moved on.

I’m not sure anymore how I got into a state where that was necessary, but do keep a reference around for how to boot Linux or Windows from the Grub command line.

Stupid 1

Made a 4-disk RAID10, back when 160GB disks were boss and I couldn't afford WD Raptors. Fiddled with some tune2fs options to make it even faster. After a reboot, fsck found some errors. Asked if I want to fix them. I said yes. It asked again for some more errors. I said yes. Eventually I jammed a screwdriver in the keyboard to accept every prompt. After a while of this a grim feeling came over me that fsck might not be doing me a favor. Stopped the machine. Booted into a live CD, mounted the fs, a good number of music and other files were gone. Luckily the corruption wiped mostly larger files like audio and video which were replaceable. I started making backups after that.

Here's what 160GB disks sequential read benchmarks used to look like:

Stupid 2

Around the same time I tried to convert Debian to Ubuntu by replacing the Debian repos in apt with Ubuntu's and following with dist-upgrade.

crontab -r .. now i always look on the keyboard when i want to edit my cronjobs

I was running a Vanilla+ Minecraft server and was wondering why my plugin was not working. I had forgotten to unzip it before uploading it to the Ubuntu server vm and didn't know how to unzip on Linux. So I just unzipped it in windows and re transferred the file. Yaay RSync.

Otherwise just basic mistakes command in the wrong folder type of stuff.

Added an usb drive by its /dev/sd** identifier to fstab without the nofail option. Wanted to do a quick reboot for something I can't remember, then copy the files over to the USB drive, since I'd need them on the next day and… no boot. The reboot had assigned another name to the drive (/dev/sdb instead of /dev/sdc or something) and automount wouldn't skip it because nofail was missing. In the middle of the night, with files I required right the next morning. Fun times.

rm ~*

If I've been repeatedly rerunning commands via ctrl-r'ing back through my history, I'll start getting careless and more than i should have I've accidentally hit enter twice on the wrong command without pausing to double check first. Sometimes to less than desirable effect...

I wanted to upgrade my Ubuntu to a newer version, but I had to do it through the command line. During the upgrade it asked if I wanted to see the file changes or something, so I said yes for fun... I couldn't get out of the menu, or rather I didn't know how and seemed to be stuck halfway through the upgrade. I tried a bunch of keys and possible combinations including.... Ctrl + X.

So after quitting the terminal halfway through a system upgrade I tried to restore through backup. Turns out the backup was corrupted or something and didn't work. I never realized because I never thought to test it. I lost a few years of photos and some music files that I've had probably for decades that I downloaded off Limewire. I still have the backup file in case it can be salvaged some day, but oh well. Most of the files I was able to download again off of the bay.

This happened just this morning. Probably not the dumbest thing ever, and I blame Snap for putting things where they don't belong: I deleted stuff from the /run/user/1000/doc directory. Turns out the files there are in fact hard links to files which actually reside somewhere else. Well, they were, until I deleted them forever.

Background: Firefox (as an Ubuntu snap package) downloads files in some kind of sandbox mode and references stuff there for some obscure reason. That was my weekly reminder to get rid of snap packages because snap sucks in a myriad of ways.

Most of mine are variations of getting confused about what system / device is which:

• Had two magnetic HDDs connected as my root partitions in RAID-1. One of the drives started getting SATA errors (couldn't write), so I powered down and disconnected what I thought was the bad disk. Reboot, lots of errors from fsck on boot up, including lots about inodes getting connected to /lost+found. I should have realised at that point that it was a bad idea to rebuild the other good drive from that one. Instead, I ended up restoring from my (fortunately very recent!) backup.
• I once typed sudo pm-suspend on my laptop because I had an important presentation coming up, and wanted to keep my battery charged. I later noticed my laptop was running low on power (so rushed to find power to charge it), and also that I needed a file from home I'd forgotten to grab. Turns out I was actually in a ssh terminal connected to my home computer that I'd accidentally suspended! This sort of thing is so common that there is a package in some distros (e.g. Debian) called molly-guard specifically to prevent that - I highly recommend it and install it now.
• I also once thought I was sending a command to a local testing VM, while wiping a database directory for re-installation. Turns out, I typed it in the wrong terminal and sent it to a dev prod environment (i.e. actively used by developers as part of their daily workflow), and we had to scramble to restore it from backup, meanwhile no one could deploy anything.

Mostly powering off my system when I shouldn't have. I believe one time I began the process to format a drive I didn't mean to and when I saw the process had started I pushed the power button and just made things worse. The other times were when I was updating.

This all happened when I first started using Linux.

Just recently I have skill issue'd myself by doing git clean -rf in my home directory where my dotfiles live and therefore deleted all of my home files. I was tired and looked for a quick way to resolve my conflicts and made the stupidest mistake one can do: execute a command you do not really understand.

At least I know what it does now and now I also do hourly local backups of my files with cron and borg.

I've reinstalled a few times throughout the years, simply because I didn't want to deal with fixing something, mainly a bloated mess with multiple desktops. Sometimes it's faster to back up home and nuke it from orbit.

Ran rm -rf after copying filepath with a space. The directory up to the space did exist. Fortunately so did a backup.

Cleaned a secondary drive mounted at the same point without noticing I was on the wrong SSH terminal tab, at least twice.

Started to DBAN (destroy) internal drive instead of external drive.

Attempting to resize the system partition without backing the system up first (right after I spent the whole day setting everything up). Gparted failed, the system did not boot any more so I had to stay up the night to redo the whole setup. No personal data loss since the system was fresh, though.

Since I got into Linux via virtual machines and Raspberry Pi before using it as my daily driver, I made most of my stupid beginner mistakes (like changing permissions on systen files) where it did not really matter.

I accidentally wiped my backup. I'm redoing my storage setup and had the backup laying nearby.

I was stunned. I immediately gave up and went to bed.

Messing around with system python/pip and newly installed versions till all was broken and then looking at documentation.
This was way back on the 00's and I'm still ashamed on how fast completely I messed it up.

I wanted to delete all the subfolders in the current directory:

 rm -rf ./*

After a few seconds, I realize in horror that I had mistyped the path. Whole system nuked. Had backups though.

formatted the wrong drive. I had to run a data rescue program which gave a bajillion files with random names...

Getting packages from a spider web of repos then not untangling the web before upgrading from one LTS release to another. Ended up with an unfixable problem with essential packages and dependency versions and had to do a fresh reinstall instead. Fortunately I backed up my files first so I didn't lose anything important.

Switched to what i thought was an old install usb; it had a close enough directory list to what i expected that i then went ahead and rm -rf * the whole thing.

Turns out that was my / directory. I only noticed because things stopped loading from the drive into memory. Everything still running actually still worked for the most part.

I have made countless mistakes since the 90s, mostly involving rm. The most recent one was yesterday when I was trying to rm files in a directory with lots of other unrelated files.

I don't remember the exact failure, but I was shooting for something like rm *lng and typo'ed rm *;ng (those chars are next to each other on the kb). This happily rm'ed * (d'oh!) then errored on the nonexistance ng. :-(

Trying to add my user to wheel: sudo groupmod -a wheel Deleted my group membership in everything but wheel. That was fun! Remote system too! Edit: I still don't remember the syntax. Geez.

I was working on my final project in a class in undergrad on the campus VAX. VMS had a versioned filesystem, which is to say that every time you saved a file (like your source code in LSE), it would create a new file (e.g., FINAL.COB;23). I was getting confused by all of the versions of my project so I decided to clean some of the older ones out:

DELETE FINAL.COB;1*

DELETE FINAL.COB;2*

I had to run to the data center the VAX was in halfway across campus to beg the sysadmins to restore $STUDENTS:[DRWHO.CS1337]FINAL.COB;* from the hourly tape backup (at least there was that) and re-debug the last two functions so I could hand it in before midnight. Lesson learned: Don't worry about cleaning up your workspace until after you're done.

I rembember adding an extra / to dev when using dd. I think I still haven’t fixed that system.

I deleted /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.

I did it because valgrind had a problem with it. I thought I can fix it with reinstalling the package. I tried to lookup which package is it from, but the command I used was wrong and I didn't get any result. So I thought, what if I created it, maybe I just forgot it.

the moment I deleted it everything stopped working. It was fixable only from a pendrive.

Renamed a drive mount folder, while it was mounted. Back in 1999 with big box Redhat 5.1, it said “okay!” And I lost all data on that drive. I was just learning Linux at the time, without an internet connection since the PCI winmodem I had didn’t work in Linux.

Deleting efi partition just because grub not updated yet.. 😅

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!

Breaking the bootloader, uninstalling nvidia drivers ton install mesa without removing mesa/nouveau from the blacklist

shutdown -h now on the wrong machine. Should have been “-r”. No IPMI but important enough to force me to drive to the office at night.

Ever since, I force myself to wait a couple seconds before sending any shutdown command, and tend to use reboot instead.

Probably removing the default python 2 runtime environment because i didn't like how running python redirected to python2.7, had to reinstall my system 4 times in a year, 4th one is currently happening. 🥲

Deleted my home folder 2 times because I wanted to rm -rf something inside my home and pressed enter too early

Ha! I just did something like that. I thought I had "orphaned" BTRFS snapshots taking up space.

I opened a file explorer as root...I deleted this one that wasn't listed.

Oh wait..."Writable snapshot"...? Oh...no.

Yeah suddenly no programs or anything worked. Sadly there was no snapshot restoring out of that one! (That I would be capable of, anyway!)

So yeah, I managed to deliberately bumble past several safeguards into the "I should know what I'm doing" area, and found a magical way to rm -rf / from the GUI, essentially. Wee!

Thankfully, /home was its own partition, so aside from minor inconveniences bringing .configs back over and other little tweaks I'd implemented, I have reinstalled OpenSUSE Tumbleweed leaner, meaner, and cleaner. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

ACTUALLY, glad I backed up /home before the reinstall because the first reinstall attempt failed and wiped it!

Backups, kids. They really are the difference between "Aw darn, live and learn."...and complete heartbreaking despair.

Was your project folder synced via nextcloud?? I had a similar issue arise with my projects folder being deleted and not in the trash bin etc, can only think nextcloud was the culprit as I had removed the folder from my server and default behaviour must be to replicate that removal locally.

So there's the time I converted my partition table from MBR to GPT and it corrupted everything on it so I had to reinstall. Took this opportunity to switch from Mint to Arch, something I'd been thinking of doing for a while.

Once on Arch, I had much more opportunities to make epic mistakes: For example not putting enough room on my root partition (home was on a separate one), so after a while I had to reinstall.

I activated aur in majoro. Twice.

Now I use endeavourOS to install my arch.btw, lol

Rermoved the Wireless card drivers while troubleshooting the Internet connection..

Tried to use Manjaro at some point. What a horrible distribution.

I tried upgrading instead of a fresh install.

Needless to say, I ended up doing a fresh install eventually...

I footgunned myself with iptables once and couldn't even google how to fix it. (Well, I could with my phone, just not the convenient google - copy - paste - run workflow)

I don't remember the details, but I was trying to control internet access of a VM guest and ended up controlling my own too.

Mine was wiping my vps while backing it up. Luckily for me I only lost some files that I could easily replace.

I once had grub and rEFInd installed on the same system and an Arch update hosed both. I was able to fix it with an Ubuntu LiveCD and went back to Ubuntu. I still use Arch in a VM as a treat.

One time on Manjaro i had a dependency issue regarding python3. So i just removed it. The I watched in horror as i saw what packages depend on python3, including pacman and manjaro-system, but did not dare to interrupt the process and end up with a half-broken system, and my curiosity wanted to see it play out. Then I rebooted, and thus legally turned my Manjaro system into a half-working Arch install. It even displayed the OS as Arch Linux. Still managed to fix it without reinstalling by downloading the package files from http mirrors, but if i was smart the entire thing should have taken 5 minutes instead of a full afternoon. Was a valuable learning experience tho

sudo apt-get purge java* good lord what a simple thing to avoid. I was pretty green at work during the time :(

I deleted some python folder and my systems have been having troubles saying the file isn't there

Use dd

I once deleted /usr/bin while trying to delete /bin (symbolic link) because I accidentally misformed it . don't remember why I had to recreate /bin in the first place but it had something to do with installing java

I did so many shit on my PC, I don't remember an interesting one. Generally that was during a distro install.

Install Red Hat.

Kidding? Maybe.

Permanently Deleted

Smh I've never done anything really stupid with my system or at least I don't remember it

Butt stuff