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What're some of the dumbest things you've done to yourself in Linux? (lemmy.ca)
submitted 3 months ago by danielquinn@lemmy.ca to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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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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[-] theroff@aussie.zone 33 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

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.

[-] DmMacniel@feddit.de 10 points 3 months ago

Damn that's the equivalent of going cold turkey.

[-] diffusive@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

I don’t use windows for close to 20 years so I didn’t need ntfsclone so far but do I read correctly the man page that only the source is specified as positional parameter? If so, shouldn’t you have to write

nftsclone —overwrite /dev/sdc /dev/sdb? It still can be misleading (given that mv uses two positional parameters so mv -f source destination would have done what you wanted) but a bit less cryptic?

[-] theroff@aussie.zone 7 points 3 months ago

Yeah, sorry it was a long time ago (like 10+ years) but I checked and it would've been the --overwrite arg.

The manpage for the older ntfsclone command has it:

Clone NTFS on /dev/hda1 to /dev/hdc1: ntfsclone --overwrite /dev/hdc1 /dev/hda1

Moral of the story was to RTFM 😂

[-] AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net 2 points 3 months ago

(RTFM = Read the Fucking Manual)

Adding this because I only learned this acronym just last week, and wish to share the knowledge with anyone else like me)

this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
264 points (97.8% liked)

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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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