Comment by lostlogin
4 years ago
You’re clearly a more capable user than me, but even so, take care. The time I accidentally moved /etc has scarred me for life.
4 years ago
You’re clearly a more capable user than me, but even so, take care. The time I accidentally moved /etc has scarred me for life.
Early on in my Linux-using-life I made the mistake of deleting /etc. That was a learning experience like no other :)
Since Live CDs/Flash drives were invented, I wouldn't worry about this stuff any longer. Certainly have your personal files in a centralized location and backed up first.
Probably the easiest way to experiment these days is to create a VM and make snapshot, then start knocking down walls, just to see when and where the house collapses. Then revert and try something new.
There's a computer game that deletes random files when you make a mistake or lose.
There could be a competition!
A couple of weeks after moving to UNIX from MSDOS, I thought I'd remove lots of unnecessary 'dot-directories' from the /tmp directory. I was root as I had no concept of being a 'normal user'.
So I ran two simple commands:
and wondered why it was taking so long. <grin>
At least that doesn't happen today anymore. From bash:
> When a pattern is used for pathname expansion, the character ``.'' at the start of a name or immediately following a slash must be matched explicitly, unless the shell option dotglob is set. The filenames ``.'' and ``..'' must always be matched explicitly, even if dotglob is set.
I did that on my NAS a few years ago. I had copied in a bunch of directories from a mac and they all had tons of dot files in each dir that were showing up on my windows machines. I popped open a terminal and did the exact same thing and wiped most of the NAS out =P Good thing I had it mirrored with my other synology.