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/etc? Never heard of her. (i.imgflip.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world
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I accidentally untarred archive intended to be extracted in root directory, which among others included some files for /etc directory.
I went on to rm -rv ~/etc, but I quickly typed rm -rv /etc instead, and hit enter, while using a root account.

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[–] 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I've literally done rm -rf / while root. I thought I was elsewhere and did rm -rf . and I was in the top level directory. When it took way longer than I expected, I hit CTRL+C about 10 times and looked at the damage. Oops.

Luckily it didn't get to /home, but it did wipe out /bin and /etc. I had to rebuild the OS. I learned.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago

    If I'm about to run an rm with a slash in it, alarm bells go off in my head. I prefer to cd to the parent and then rm whatever without slashes in the name.

    That didn't save me the other day when I accidentally put a space before an asterisk, but thankfully that wasn't in a place that was overly important.

    Gotta retrain myself to look out for extra nothing now.

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