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.

  • diffusive@lemmy.world
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    6 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
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      6 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
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        6 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)