Linux

48090 readers

897 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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.

Rules

Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
No misinformation
No NSFW content
No hate speech, bigotry, etc

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

265

What're some of the dumbest things you've done to yourself in Linux? (lemmy.ca)

submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

302 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Spaces are fine in filenames. Just always always always quote your paths and/or variables..

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Sounds great in theory, but when you are trying to use awk to print out commands that might have something like printf and have to start escaping quotes, it gets really messy really quick. I have run into situations like this more than I care to as I like writing commands that will write out other commands. Spaces in filenames also mess with things like sed or sort where you want a specific column. Sorry, but in my opinion using the same character that was previously determined to be a delimiter is just a bad idea.