this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2024
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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.

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[–] theroff@aussie.zone 33 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

ntfsclone /dev/sdc /dev/sdb

/dev/sdb was a blank filesystem and /dev/sdc was my Windows filesystem.

ntfsclone man page

It ran for less than a second and didn't take me long to figure out what happened. That's the story of how I stopped using Windows.

[–] DmMacniel@feddit.de 10 points 7 months ago

Damn that's the equivalent of going cold turkey.

[–] diffusive@lemmy.world 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I don’t use windows for close to 20 years so I didn’t need ntfsclone so far but do I read correctly the man page that only the source is specified as positional parameter? If so, shouldn’t you have to write

nftsclone —overwrite /dev/sdc /dev/sdb? It still can be misleading (given that mv uses two positional parameters so mv -f source destination would have done what you wanted) but a bit less cryptic?

[–] theroff@aussie.zone 7 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, sorry it was a long time ago (like 10+ years) but I checked and it would've been the --overwrite arg.

The manpage for the older ntfsclone command has it:

Clone NTFS on /dev/hda1 to /dev/hdc1: ntfsclone --overwrite /dev/hdc1 /dev/hda1

Moral of the story was to RTFM 😂

[–] AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net 2 points 7 months ago

(RTFM = Read the Fucking Manual)

Adding this because I only learned this acronym just last week, and wish to share the knowledge with anyone else like me)