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.
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.
Then you restored from the snapshot or backup you had right? Right?
This was hosted on bare metal on a file system that didn’t support snapshots. And the backup system? A state of the art tape drive. That’s why I was creating my own backup as part of the launch.
We recovered by using the staging site content.