I agree with this take, don't wanna blame the victim but there's a lesson to be learned.

I dunno, ~/bin is a fairly common thing in my experience, not that it ends up containing many actual binaries. (The system started it, miss, honest. A quarter of the things in my system's /bin are text based.)

~/etc is seriously weird though. Never seen that before. On Debians, most of the user copies of things in /etc usually end up under ~/.local/ or at ~/.filenamehere

[OP] accidentally untarred archive intended to be extracted in root directory, which among others included some files for /etc directory.

Oh, my! Perfect use of that scene. I don't always lol, when I say lol. But I lol'ed at this for real.

So, you don't do backups of /etc? Or parts of it?

I have those tars dir ssh, pam, and portage for Gentoo systems. Quickset way to set stuff up.

And before you start whining about ansible or puppet or what, I need those maybe 3-4 times a year to set up a temporary hardened system.

But may, just maybe, don't assume everyone is a fucking moron or has no idea.

Edit Or just read what op did, I think that is pretty much the same

o.7

Nvidia once did it in their install script

That doesn't protect you from typos.

rm -rv /home/schmuck /etc

"Whoops, I accidentally added a space."

I have three ways around this:

1. ls ~/etc ... <press up arrow, replace ls with rm -rv>
2. ls ~/etc ... rm -rv !$
3. Add the commands to a simple script and use variables to remove the danger of a command line.

Just get a cli trash tool and alias it to rm. Arch wiki

Hey that's a pretty good idea. I'm stealing that.

i always do "read;rm ./file" which gives me a second to confirm and also makes it so i don't accidentally execute it out of my bash history with control-r

Also stealing this. What an awesome tip

This need's to be higher in the comments!

instructions on clear, switched to vi mode in bash and cant exit

I can't type ctrl-z without reflexively typing bg after, so no joy there.

Amateurs. You all did it accidentally. I deleted system critical files intentionally believing it was beneficial.

I can do one better. A similar 'rm' command but while a Windows disk was mounted read/write. So, 2 OSes damaged in one command.

rock = (rock_t) stones[0];

I am he. But I won't

That or make your system immutable

Wish ZFS didn't constantly cause my proxmox to need to be forcefully restarted after the ZFS pool crashed randomly.

Is there any reason to use a root account?

if you just borked your /etc and need to rebuild because you don't have sudo anymore

Would it? I think it would have just let you do it.

The biggest flaw with cars is when they crash. When I crash my car due to user error, because I made a small mistake, this proves that cars are dangerous. Some other vehicles like planes get around this by only allowing trusted users to do dangerous actions, why can't cars be more like planes? /s

Always backup important data, always have the ability to restore your backups. If rm doesn't get it, ransomware or a bad/old drive will.

A sysadmin deleting /bin is annoying, but it shouldn't take them more than a few mins to get a fresh copy from a backup or a donor machine. Or to just be more careful instead.

The handbook has numbered pages, so why use "page X of the pdf"? I don't see the page count in my mobile browser - you made me do math.

(I think it's page number 22 btw, for anyone else wondering)

Edit: nevermind, wrong section.

I don't know if it should be a bad thing. Inside the tar archive the configs were already organized into their respective dirctories, this way with --preserve-permissions --overwrite I could just quickly add the desired versions of configs.
Some examples of contents:

-rw-r--r-- root/root      2201 2026-02-18 08:08 etc/pam.d/sshd
-rw-r--r-- root/root       399 2026-02-17 23:22 etc/pam.d/sudo
-rw-r--r-- root/root      2208 2026-02-18 09:13 etc/sysctl.conf
drwx------ user/user         0 2026-02-17 23:28 home/user/.ssh/
-rw------- user/user       205 2026-02-17 23:29 home/user/.ssh/authorized_keys
drwxrwxr-x user/user         0 2026-02-18 16:30 home/user/.vnc/
-rw-rw-r-- user/user        85 2026-02-18 15:32 home/user/.vnc/tigervnc.conf
-rw-r--r-- root/root      3553 2026-02-18 08:04 etc/ssh/sshd_config

Keeps permissions, keeps ownership, puts things where they belong (or copies from where they were), and you end up with a single file that can be stored on whatever filesystem.

that was my reaction when I saw a coworker put random files and directories into / of a server

I feel like some people don't have a feeling about how a file system works

alias rm=“echo no”

The only backups i have are /etc/nixos/configuration.nix and ~ the rest and die in a fire

Otherwise, etckeeper is nice.

To feel the thrill

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

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

I accidentally untarred archive intended to be extracted in root directory

same

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?

I've always just used gio trash (formerly gvfs-trash). KDE-based systems have something similar (but with syntax that's perfectly logical but completely unsuitable, in my opinion).

The third party trash package works in places the GUI and the aforementioned GUI-related command line tools may not. I can't tell whether this is a bug in trash or in the system tools, TBH.

For example, /tmp is one such directory where trash works but gio trash refuses.

Either way, the GUI Rubbish Bin won't keep track if things are deleted from such places by trash.

Bruh

Last week I started a utility to check if the sectors of a usb drive were damaged. I did not read the big red banner saying that it does so by writing to every sector...

I am still triple checking when I see /dev/sda as a target drive in such utilities. I use NVMe, so nowadays that's probably a flash drive for me, but it still gives me adrenaline when I notice it.

It's drive destroyer for a reason.

I try to always put the -rf at the end for this reason. Not sure what works on Mac but it does allow it on most Linux shells

Yakuake terminal: https://apps.kde.org/yakuake/

For when you want to livestream your failures directly to the terminal

That just trained me to automatically add -f to avoid the prompts.

I think he pressed up after having run that command to see what he wrote wrong.

shh enjoy the funny /s

Half a year ago I accidentally git cloned to a folder named ~, so naturally I did rm -rf ~.

Mistakes were made. Fortunately I backup my ~ so it was just annoying.

If I'm about to run an rm with a slash in it, alarm bells go off in my head. I prefer to cd to the parent and then rm whatever without slashes in the name.

That didn't save me the other day when I accidentally put a space before an asterisk, but thankfully that wasn't in a place that was overly important.

Gotta retrain myself to look out for extra nothing now.