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.
apt
something that ended up removingsudo
. No more admin rights.rsync
to backup pretty much everything in / , with remove source option…find
with-delete
option miss positioned. It deleted stuff before finding matching patternchown
/chmod
on/bin
and/or/usr/bin
/etc
On 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 sudo
if deb file is still in cache. If not, you have to make network function without systemd forapt install
to work. Or, you can get sudo deb file and all missing dependencies from usb stick andapt install
them from fs. Or just enable root, give it a password and reboot so you cansu -
andapt install sudo
Thanks!
The first one can be fixed by using
su
Not 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