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.

  • ReallyZen
    9·
    2 months ago

    $ grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.conf

    Thaaat… took me a stupid amount of time to fix.

    • anarkatten
      6·
      2 months ago

      There’s nothing wrong with that command, per se. You must’ve ducked up something else?

      • nexussapphire@lemm.eeEnglish
        17·
        2 months ago

        It’s grub.cfg not grub.conf. it’s really easy to miss because everything else is .conf.

          • ReallyZen
            8·
            2 months ago

            Me too, including when ferociously trying to debug why grub wouldn’t find a freaking bootable anything. The error message isn’t “uh, no config bro” but “hey, nothing to boot here, see ya in The Shell”. Argh.

            • nexussapphire@lemm.eeEnglish
              2·
              2 months ago

              Yeah, it has definitely caught me off guard a couple of times when installing Arch. At that stage if there’s no grub it didn’t install or the ESP flag isn’t set on EFI. If there is grub but no options it’s usually the config.

              One time it was because I forgot to install the kernel, it took me a while to figure that one out.

          • nexussapphire@lemm.eeEnglish
            1·
            2 months ago

            Yeah, for a while I didn’t realize auto complete was as simple as installing bashcompletion. Doesn’t help if the file doesn’t exist though.