Linux

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.

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. :-(

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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!

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.. 😅

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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