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.
Next time:
ls ~/etc rm -rv !$Thank god you used -rv and not -rf 😂😂😂
Genuinely curious… why using root for operations like these?
To feel the thrill
Reminds me of when I had a rogue
~directory sitting in my own home directory (probably from a badly written script). Three seconds intorm -rf ~and me wondering why it was taking so long to complete, I CTRL+C, reboot, and pray.Alas, it was a reinstall for me that day (good excuse to distro hop, anyway). Really glad I don’t mount my personal NAS folder in my home directory anymore, holy shit.
Bruh
I am new to Linux and just getting somewhat comfortable as my daily driver, very proud of myself that I got the joke pretty quickly :)
That’s what tools like trash-cli are for.
Sudo apt-get install /etc
Ok speaking of this, where do a distro’s config and boot scripts even come from? Are they in a package? Like on Debian so the .debs have metadata that can add cron jobs and such?
Yup
Yeah, same like with unclosed bottles, glass too close to the table edge, etc. Accidents that can hapen, will happen. Better name them something else in your user dir.
OOOOOOOOOOOF!!
One trick I use, because I’m SUPER paranoid about this, is to mv things I intend to delete to /tmp, or make /tmp/trash or something.
That way, I can move it back if I have a “WHAT HAVE I DONE!?” moment, or it just deletes itself upon reboot.
Also stealing this. What an awesome tip
i always do “read;rm ./file” which gives me a second to confirm and also makes it so i don’t accidentally execute it out of my bash history with control-r
Just get a cli trash tool and alias it to rm.
That’s certainly something you can do! I would personally follow the recommendation against aliasing rm though, either just using the trash tool’s auto complete or a different alias altogether.
Reason being as someone mentioned below: You don’t want to give yourself a false sense of security or complacency with such a dangerous command, especially if you use multiple systems.
I liken it to someone starting to handle weapons more carelessly because the one they have at home is “never loaded.” Better safe than sorry.
I think this is the best approach. I’ve created a short alias for my trash tool and also aliased
rmto do nothing except print a warning. This way you train yourself to avoid using it. And if I really need it for some reason I can just type\rm.If you want to train yourself even more effectively you can also alias
rmto runslinstead :)
This need’s to be higher in the comments!
Hey that’s a pretty good idea. I’m stealing that.
After being bitten by rm a few times, the impulse rises to alias the rm command so that it does an
“rm -i”or, better yet, to replace the rm command with a program that moves the files to be deleted to a special hidden directory, such as~/.deleted. These tricks lull innocent users into a false sense of security.I’ve read this somewhere too! Where are you quoting it from if I may ask?
But yes I also agree 💯%. rm should always be treated with respect and care by default rather than “customizing the danger away.”
Quoting from Linux Hater’s Handbook, lovely read
… is it the “UNIX-Hater’s Handbook” from 1994 with a parody of “The Scream” on the cover?
LOL nice, I’ll have to check it out. :) Thanks!
Ohohoho man did you ever fuck up. I did that once too. I can’t remember how I fixed it. I think I had to reinstall the whole OS
I’ve had a combination of tab complete and filename spaces lead to things like
rm Some\ Common\ Prefix *at least three times. Instant regret. I’ve now got a pretty good intuitive reflex around this type of thing. You eventually get enough callouses.Be happy that you didn’t remeber the ~ and put a space between it and etc😃.
Ahh, the rites of passage!
So good to see that, even in 2026, Unix Haters’ Handbook’s part on rm is still valid. See page 59 of the pdf
Accidents Will Happen
If Dennis and Ken had a Selectric instead of a Teletype, we’d probably be typing “copy” and “remove” instead of “cp” and “rm.”
Proof again that technology limits our choices as often as it expands them. After more than two decades, what is the excuse for continuing this tradition? The implacable force of history, AKA existing code and books. If a vendor replaced rm by, say, remove, then every book describing Unix would no longer apply to its system, and every shell script that calls rm would also no longer apply. Such a vendor might as well stop implement-ing the POSIX standard while it was at it.
A century ago, fast typists were jamming their keyboards, so engineers designed the QWERTY keyboard to slow them down. Computer key-boards don’t jam, but we’re still living with QWERTY today.
A century from now, the world will still be living with rm.
Btw, what’s this about QWERTY to slow them down? Far as i know, it’s to reduce finger travel?
Qwerty was developed so that typewriter hammers have a low chance of hitting each other and get stuck. It was never about finger travel or ergonomics.
PCs adapted the layout and unfortunately we stuck with it ever since. There are many better layouts, some more extreme in terms of difference to qwerty, some just fix the most blatant problems. Colemak and Dvorak for example.
On mechanical typewriters the little arms that slap the steel letters onto the ink ribbon/paper could get physically jammed. QWERTY was designed to make it so that was less likely to happen by placing the keys in an order that discouraged it.
At least, that’s the way I learned it.
Source: trust me bro
The handbook has numbered pages, so why use “page X of the pdf”? I don’t see the page count in my mobile browser - you made me do math.
(I think it’s page number 22 btw, for anyone else wondering)
The handbook has numbered pages, so why use “page X of the pdf”?
Because the book’s page 1 is the pdf’s page 41, everything before is numbered with roman numerals :)
I also wasn’t expecting anyone to try and read with a browser or reader that doesn’t show the current page number
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I dont know if you use firefox on your phone, but i do, and i fucking hate it that i cant jump to a page or see the page number im on.
That is what I’m using. I don’t really read enough pdf:s to notice it normally, but I guess it’s another reason to get off my ass about switching browsers ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The biggest flaw with cars is when they crash. When I crash my car due to user error, because I made a small mistake, this proves that cars are dangerous. Some other vehicles like planes get around this by only allowing trusted users to do dangerous actions, why can’t cars be more like planes? /s
Always backup important data, always have the ability to restore your backups. If rm doesn’t get it, ransomware or a bad/old drive will.
A sysadmin deleting /bin is annoying, but it shouldn’t take them more than a few mins to get a fresh copy from a backup or a donor machine. Or to just be more careful instead.
Unix aficionados accept occasional file deletion as normal. For example, consider following excerpt from the comp.unix.questions FAQ:
6) How do I “undelete” a file?
Someday, you are going to accidentally type something like:
rm * .foo
and find you just deleted “*” instead of “*.foo”. Consider it a rite of passage.
Of course, any decent systems administrator should be doing regular backups. Check with your sysadmin to see if a recent backup copy of your file is available“A rite of passage”? In no other industry could a manufacturer take such a cavalier attitude toward a faulty product. “But your honor, the exploding gas tank was just a rite of passage.”
There’s a reason sane programs ask for confirmation for potentially dangerous commands
Reusing names of critical system directories in subdirectories in your home dir.
I’ll provide some cover. This is my current home directory:
bin/ bmp/ cam/ doc/ eot/ hhc/ img/ iso/ mix/ mku/ mod/ mtv/ mus/ pkg/ run/ src/ tmp/ vid/ zim/. It’s your home directory, enjoy it however you like.Oh, my! Perfect use of that scene. I don’t always lol, when I say lol. But I lol’ed at this for real.
I agree with this take, don’t wanna blame the victim but there’s a lesson to be learned.
except if you read the accompanying text they already started the issue by accidentally unpacking an archive to their user directory that was intended for the root directory. that’s how they got an etc dir in their user directory in the first place
Could make one archive intended to be unpacked from /etc/ and one archive that’s intended to be unpacked from /home/Alice/ , that way they wouldn’t need to be root for the user bit, and there would never be an etc directory to delete. And if they run tar test (t) and pwd first, they could check the intended actions were correct before running the full tar. Some tools can be dangerous, so the user should be aware, and have safety measures.
they acquired a tar package from somewhere else. the instructions said to extract it to the root directory (because of its file structure). they accidentally extracted it to their home dir
that is how this happened. not anything like what you were saying
[OP] accidentally untarred archive intended to be extracted in root directory, which among others included some files for /etc directory.
I dunno, ~/bin is a fairly common thing in my experience, not that it ends up containing many actual binaries. (The system started it, miss, honest. A quarter of the things in my system’s /bin are text based.)
~/etc is seriously weird though. Never seen that before. On Debians, most of the user copies of things in /etc usually end up under ~/.local/ or at ~/.filenamehere
It should be ~/.local/bin
~/bin is the old-school location from before .local became a thing, and some of us have stuck to that ancient habit.
I think the home directory version of etc is ~/.config as per xdg.
I use ~/config/* to put directories named the same as system ones. I got used to it in BeOS and brought it to LFS when I finally accepted BeOS wasn’t doing what I needed anymore, kept doing it ever since.
So, you don’t do backups of /etc? Or parts of it?
I have those tars dir ssh, pam, and portage for Gentoo systems. Quickset way to set stuff up.
And before you start whining about ansible or puppet or what, I need those maybe 3-4 times a year to set up a temporary hardened system.
But may, just maybe, don’t assume everyone is a fucking moron or has no idea
But may, just maybe, don’t assume everyone is a fucking moron or has no idea.
Well, OP didn’t say they used Arch, btw so it’s safe to assume.
(I hate that this needs a /s)
