I’m a complete moron, I should’ve had that backed up and used trash…
I had to learn the hard way lol

  • OneCardboardBox@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    2·
    3 hours ago

    I once had a directory in /tmp called etc which contained subdirectories for something I was migrating.

    I thought that I was in /tmp when I ran rm -rf etc… I was actually in /

  • ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org
    14·
    11 hours ago

    Here’s a rule I learned the hard way a few decades ago:

    • If you type “rm”, take you hands off the keyboard and take one deliberate breath before continuing your command.
    • If you then type “-r”, do it again.
    • If you then type “-f” do it again.
    • In all cases, re-read what you wrote before hitting ENTER.
    • xor@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      6·
      7 hours ago

      I’m a big fan of starting the command with a #, then removing it once I’m happy with the command to defend against accidentally hitting enter

      Putting ~ next to the enter key on keyboards (at least UK ones) was an evil villain level decision

        • Lucy :3@feddit.org
          2·
          10 hours ago

          In the few years of me exclusively using the command line to manage files, even having rm aliased to rm -rf, and at some point to sudo rm -rf, out of convenience, I think it has happened thrice that I deleted the wrong file, and twice I was able to restore it with (hourly) backups. The third time, it was a minecraft world which I had created to test some mods and the server start script, and I had excluded it from backups because my ~/games dir is usually only used by steam.

  • RenardDesMers@lemmy.ml
    4·
    9 hours ago

    Sorry for your loss. I did something similar recently. A script was creating a “~” folder in my notes folder. I wanted to delete it… Thankfully it stopped at some file it couldn’t remove and my dotfiles are in git.

  • sadTruth@lemmy.hogru.ch
    5·
    11 hours ago

    Tipps to prevent future accidents:

    • Set up BTRFS snapshots with Timeshift or Snapper. Switching to BTRFS is worth it for snapshots alone.
    • Do regular backups on a device that can not be reached by rm: vorta local on external hdd that you connect once a week OR vorta/borg2 to a NAS/Server that does BTRFS snapshots itself OR Nextcloud to sync to a server that has a trashbin OR git to a server. Just remember that Nextcloud and git are unencrypted, so the server has to be secure and trustworthy. Vorta and borg2 can be set up with encryption.

    Mistakes are unpreventable due to our error-prone brains, but it is a choice to repeat them.

  • TGhost [She/Her]@lemm.eeEnglish
    22·
    15 hours ago

    I’m a complete moron,

    You are not,
    Every person learning with the hardway isnt a moron,

    You have to do, to really learn,

      • clb92@feddit.dkEnglish
        2·
        10 hours ago

        Also the && operator in sh. I think you can figure out what happened.

        I’m guessing something like… Copy file/dir from location A to location B and then delete from A, but the copy had failed (and the delete unfortunately worked fine)?

        • UnRelatedBurner@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          6 hours ago

          I left the last sentence open ended, for comedic effect, but if you really wanna know:

          I transcoded videos with ffmpeg, and tried to exit out of the bash script with ctrl C. the script was something like:

          for
    ffmpeg file finishedFile;
    rm file;

          my ^C broke out only from ffmpeg and before I realized what happened the file got removed and the next ffmpeg call filled my terminal. I tought the key didn’t register, or something was stuck, so I pressed it again… and again… it cost like 45minutes of footage, wasn’t that important tho.

  • eldavi@lemmy.mlEnglish
    16·
    19 hours ago

    if your session is still running you can use env to help reconstruct it