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.

Yeah, same thing like with unclosed bottles, cup too close to the table edge, etc.: Accidents that can hapen, will happen.
Better name them something else in your user dir.

And yes, painful experience.

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 :)

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?

Genuinely curious… why using root for operations like these?

That's what tools like trash-cli are for.

Yup

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 into rm -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.

Next time:

ls ~/etc
rm -rv !$

💀

Bruh

it could be worse: rm -rv ~ /etc

I fucking hate using rm for these very reasons.

There's another program called "trash-cli" that gives you a trash command instead of going straight to deletion.

I'm not sure why more distros don't include it by default, or why more tutorials don't mention it.

Or press alt+. to paste final argument of previous command

Reminds me in the t-shirt: "don't drink and root"

This is also dangerous because you could run the second command by accident later when browsing command history

with tab you can expand the !$, should be a zsh thing