Linux

Ran rm -rf after copying filepath with a space. The directory up to the space did exist. Fortunately so did a backup.

Cleaned a secondary drive mounted at the same point without noticing I was on the wrong SSH terminal tab, at least twice.

Mostly powering off my system when I shouldn't have. I believe one time I began the process to format a drive I didn't mean to and when I saw the process had started I pushed the power button and just made things worse. The other times were when I was updating.

This all happened when I first started using Linux.

Trying to add my user to wheel: sudo groupmod -a wheel Deleted my group membership in everything but wheel. That was fun! Remote system too! Edit: I still don't remember the syntax. Geez.

I deleted /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.

I did it because valgrind had a problem with it. I thought I can fix it with reinstalling the package. I tried to lookup which package is it from, but the command I used was wrong and I didn't get any result. So I thought, what if I created it, maybe I just forgot it.

the moment I deleted it everything stopped working. It was fixable only from a pendrive.

Mounted root to a game folder on home and sudo rm -rf ~/games/* because I accidentally copied the home folder into the games subvol which turned out to be the root subvol. Thanks btrfs!

shutdown -h now on the wrong machine. Should have been “-r”. No IPMI but important enough to force me to drive to the office at night.

Ever since, I force myself to wait a couple seconds before sending any shutdown command, and tend to use reboot instead.

Switched to what i thought was an old install usb; it had a close enough directory list to what i expected that i then went ahead and rm -rf * the whole thing.

Turns out that was my / directory. I only noticed because things stopped loading from the drive into memory. Everything still running actually still worked for the most part.

Ha! I just did something like that. I thought I had "orphaned" BTRFS snapshots taking up space.

I opened a file explorer as root...I deleted this one that wasn't listed.

Oh wait..."Writable snapshot"...? Oh...no.

Yeah suddenly no programs or anything worked. Sadly there was no snapshot restoring out of that one! (That I would be capable of, anyway!)

So yeah, I managed to deliberately bumble past several safeguards into the "I should know what I'm doing" area, and found a magical way to rm -rf / from the GUI, essentially. Wee!

Thankfully, /home was its own partition, so aside from minor inconveniences bringing .configs back over and other little tweaks I'd implemented, I have reinstalled OpenSUSE Tumbleweed leaner, meaner, and cleaner. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

ACTUALLY, glad I backed up /home before the reinstall because the first reinstall attempt failed and wiped it!

Backups, kids. They really are the difference between "Aw darn, live and learn."...and complete heartbreaking despair.

Breaking the bootloader, uninstalling nvidia drivers ton install mesa without removing mesa/nouveau from the blacklist

Probably removing the default python 2 runtime environment because i didn't like how running python redirected to python2.7, had to reinstall my system 4 times in a year, 4th one is currently happening. 🥲

Was your project folder synced via nextcloud?? I had a similar issue arise with my projects folder being deleted and not in the trash bin etc, can only think nextcloud was the culprit as I had removed the folder from my server and default behaviour must be to replicate that removal locally.

Deleted my home folder 2 times because I wanted to rm -rf something inside my home and pressed enter too early

So there's the time I converted my partition table from MBR to GPT and it corrupted everything on it so I had to reinstall. Took this opportunity to switch from Mint to Arch, something I'd been thinking of doing for a while.

Once on Arch, I had much more opportunities to make epic mistakes: For example not putting enough room on my root partition (home was on a separate one), so after a while I had to reinstall.