Tinkering is all fun and games, until it’s 4 am, your vision is blurry, and thinking straight becomes a non-option, or perhaps you just get overly confident, type something and press enter before considering the consequences of the command you’re about to execute… And then all you have is a kernel panic and one thought bouncing in your head: “damn, what did I expect to happen?”.
Off the top of my head I remember 2 of those. Both happened a while ago, so I don’t remember all the details, unfortunately.
For the warmup, removing PAM. I was trying to convert my artix install to a regular arch without reinstalling everything. Should be kinda simple: change repos, install systemd, uninstall dinit and it’s units, profit. Yet after doing just that I was left with some PAM errors… So, I Rdd-ed libpam instead of just using --overwrite. Needless to say, I had to search for live usb yet again.
And the one at least I find quite funny. After about a year of using arch I was considering myself a confident enough user, and it so happened that I wanted to install smth that was packaged for debian. A reasonable person would, perhaps, write a pkgbuild that would unpack the .deb and install it’s contents properly along with all the necessary dependencies. But not me, I installed dpkg. The package refused to either work or install complaining that the version of glibc was incorrect… So, I installed glibc from Debian’s repos. After a few seconds my poor PC probably spent staring in disbelief at the sheer stupidity of the meatbag behind the keyboard, I was met with a reboot, a kernel panic, and a need to find another PC to flash an archiso to a flash drive ('cause ofc I didn’t have one at the time).
Anyways, what are your stories?
source ~/.bash_history
I’m genuinely having a chuckle at how shocked people are at my submission, made my day xD
I mean, it’s simple, elegant, and destructive AF given the right circumstances. Basically a chaos grenade we didn’t realize existed
source is a bash shell built-in command that executes the content of the file passed as argument, in the current shell.
~/.bash_history contains all the commands you ever executed in bash (the default shell in most Linux systems)
To add on to this explanation, you generally use source ~/.bashrc to reload your shell whenever you want to make changes to your user config. Tab completion weakens the barrier to destruction significantly (esp. in my case)
Reminded me of this: https://github.com/jtroo/kanata/issues/595
Same concept, different granularity!
Perhaps not the same definition of “broken” that you’re looking for, but when I first started using Linux, I was using Kubuntu as my first distro have some brief experimenting with Manjaro.
Anyway, back then, I for some reason had the Skype snap installed. Can’t recall why I had it to begin with, but I decided later on that ofc I didn’t need Skype, and of course uninstalled the snap.
A few days later, I was met with some storage issues, where I had a limited amount of storage left on my SSD. I’m sitting there a little confused since I swore I was using less storage, but I did a thorough cleaning of my computer by deleting files I didn’t necessarily need, and uninstalling any programs that I hardly ever used. That seemed to do the job, even if it was less storage space…
Until the next day, when the storage was full again. After getting some help from someone, I found that Skype, despite being uninstalled, was still running in the background, and found that there were residual files. The residual stuff running in the background was trying to communicate with what I had uninstalled, and logged multiple errors per second in a plaintext file that ended up being 176GB.
Whether I did something wrong or if there was something up with the snap, I still don’t know as this was over a year ago and I was still learning the ropes of Linux at the time.
I agree in blaming Snap for that 😂 good ol apt would have done a better job, I guess.
Many many years ago I wanted to clean up my freshly installed Slackware system by removing old files.
find / -mtime +30 -exec rm -f {};
Bad idea.
Not me, but one I saw… dude used chmod to lock down permissions across the board… including root… including the chmod command.
“What do I do?”
🤔
“Re-install?”
You could boot on an USB, mount the filesystem and change the permissions. But if the dude changed a whole lot of permissions, reinstalling might be the smart thing to do…
Changed it all to 000. ಠ_ಠ
There’s got to be other tools though that could change the file permissions on chmod, right? Though I suppose you’d need permission to use them and/or download them.
You can dump the permissions from the working system and restore them. Quite useful when working with archives that don’t support those attributes or when you run random stuff from the web 😁
@jordanlund @fl42v I *think* this one could be recoverable if they had a terminal still active by using the dynamic loader to call chmod — or by booting from a liveCD and chmodding from there.
That’d likely get you to a ‘working’ state quickly, but it’d take forever to get back to a ‘sane’ state with correct permissions on everything.
Tried to convert Ubuntu to Debian by replacing the repos in sources.list and apt dist-upgrading. 💣 Teenagers…
