If I'm breaking any rules, apologies.

I know, labeling something a repost is a lead weight, but I'm a fan of full disclosure. I posted this topic two years ago and I thoroughly enjoyed reading all the replies, I even learned a few things. Time has passed, and I figure some of you out there will have some new and interesting stories to share, so tell me:

So I was thinking of silly things I’ve done that pseudo-broke my system, or made me think I had a broken system. Like the time I put the cmd :

exit

in my ~/.bash_aliases file and I had to open a text editor to fix it because that broke all the terminals on my machine.

I’m curious what other silly things users have done to confuse themselves.

Op Op.

A few years ago at $DAYJOB, we were evaluating Apache Nifi, which is basically a data routing tool. I wanted to use it for reading some files from one directory and just writing them back out to another.

So, I figured, I have two stray files in my home-directory, I'll just tell it to read straight from the home-directory.
What I didn't expect, is that it would recurse into subdirectories.
And even less so, that it would remove the files it had read.

So, all the files in my home-directory were gone.

Although, it had written them dutifully to that other directory. So, in theory, I still had all my files.

But it hadn't copied the folder structure. Documents, SSH keys, cache files, everything was placed into a single, flat folder.

mv important.sql ...

Not exactly Linux related but I think it is in the same spirit.

I self-host a git server at home which uses non-default SSH port. In my home network I did a local port-forward from port 22, so that I didn't have to specify it every time I connect to it. I somehow messed up the port-forward rule, so it routed all outbound traffic to port 22 to my home server. I didn't notice this for a while.

After a few months I tried to connect to another SSH server (public, work-related) and it failed. I tried the same with a VPN with an exit node in another country and this time it worked. I got scared that my ISP or some adversary was trying to do a MITM attack. I remembered my local network configuration about an hour later. Gave myself a big scare that day. 😅

I like to tell people who are new/scared of computers that breaking stuff is part of learning. And those are seem like wizards with technology probably have the most cyber-skeletons in their closet.

Biggest "whoopsy" I've ever done was actually back on my first laptop running Windows Vista. 12yo me went on the hunt for "free frame-rate" so I could play Minecraft at higher than 15fps So I looked into overclocking and of course since I was a dumb kid, I didn't try incrementally increase the clock/power draw and instead just cranked everything to max...Yeah I didn't have a computer for a most of the year after that.

As for dumb stuff I've done on Linux, Well I once spend most of a day compiling Librewolf from source because I didn't know how the AUR worked yet. That and un-mounting my boot drive while trying to mount an iso image through the terminal one time...maybe twice...

In the old days of IRC I fell for the good old ’rm - rf /’ once, in a root prompt ofcourse. That was before rm got some sanity check that would protect against this.

One time my computer ran way, way worse after I cleaned it. Like it was so bad and noticeable that I thought I had a virus or something, and spent a ton of time looking at task manager and stuff like that. Then, I opened it again and realized the motheboard power cable was only partially in. Plugged it back in fully and it ran perfectly.

What is task manager? Do you mean btop? I smell a windows user. (jokes)

I assume there is a task manager in Linux but I don't know because I just use btop.