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.
aptsomething that ended up removingsudo. No more admin rights.rsyncto backup pretty much everything in / , with remove source option…findwith-deleteoption miss positioned. It deleted stuff before finding matching patternchown/chmodon/binand/or/usr/bin/etcOn the first point: isn’t it possible to just go su and reinstall sudo?
Or does it not work with disabled root?
It doesn’t work with root disabled.
The way to fix this is to boot in bash recovery where you land a root shell. From there you can hopefully
apt install sudoif deb file is still in cache. If not, you have to make network function without systemd forapt installto work. Or, you can get sudo deb file and all missing dependencies from usb stick andapt installthem from fs. Or just enable root, give it a password and reboot so you cansu -andapt install sudoThanks!
The first one can be fixed by using
suNot if root account is disabled. Which is by default on Ubuntu and Debian . You’d need
sudo su -but well… No sudo left you know.Damn