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.

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?”

Tried to convert Ubuntu to Debian by replacing the repos in sources.list and apt dist-upgrading. 💣 Teenagers…

One that I can remember many years ago, classic trying to do something on a flash drive and dd my main hdd instead.

Funny thing, since this was a 5400rpm and noticed relatively quick (say 1-2 minutes), I could ctrl-c the dd, make a backup of most of my personal files (being very careful not to reboot) and after that I could safely reformat and reinstall.

To this day it amazes me how linux managed to not crash with a half broken root file system (I mean, sure, things were crashing right and left, but given the situation, having enough to back up most things was like magic)

First, the classical typo in a bash script:

set FOLDER=/some/folder

rm -rf ${FODLER}/

which is why I like to add a set -u at the begining of a script.

The second one is not with a Linux box but a mainframe running AIX:

If on Linux killall java kills all java processes, on AIX it just ignore the arguments and kill all processes that the user can kill. Adios the CICS region 😬 (on the test env. thankfully)

sudo rm -f /lib /usr/share/backup/blah blah.tar.gz

Note the space.

I thoroughly backup up my slow nvme before installing a new faster one. I actually didn’t even want to reuse the installation, just the files at /home.

So I mounted it at /mnt/backupnvme0n1, 2, etc and rsynced

The first few dry runs showed a lot of data was redundant, so I geniously thought “wow I should delete some of these”. And that’s when I did a classic sudo rm -rf in the /mnt root folder instead of /mnt/dirthathadthoseredundantfiles

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?”.

Nah, that’s when the fun really starts! ;)

The package refused to either work or install complaining that the version of glibc was incorrect… So, I installed glibc from Debian’s repos.

:D That one is a classic. Most distributions don’t include packagers from other distros because 99% of the time it’s a bad idea. But with Arch you can do whatever you want, of course

My two things:

• I’ve heard about some new coreutils (rm, cp, cat… this time the name really fits the contents :D) and I decided to test it out. Of course it was conflicting with my current coreutils package and I couldn’t just replace it because deleting the old package would break requirements. So without thinking I forced the package manager to delete it “I’ll install a new one in just a second”. Turns out it’s hard to install a package without cp, etc :D
• I don’t remember what I was doing but I overwrote the first bytes of hdd. Meaning my partition table disappeared. Nothing could be mounted, no partitions found. Seemingly a brick.
  Turns out, if you run a rescue iso, ask it to try and recognize partitions and recreate the table without formatting, Linux will come back to life as if nothing happened

CTRL-C-ing apt because it looked stuck for more than 10 minutes. I don’t recommend doing it.

Not quite catastrophic but:

I’m in the process of switching my main server over from windows to Linux

I went with Deb 12 and it all works smoothly but I don’t have enough room to back up data to change the drive formats so they’re still NTFS. I was looking at my main media HDD and thought “oh, I’ll at least delete those windows partitions and leave the main partition intact.”

I found out the hard way that NTFS partitions can’t just reclaim space like that. It shuffles all the data when you change the partition. It’s currently 23 hours into the job and it’s 33% done.

I did this to reclaim 30 MB of space on a 14 TB drive.

First time trying Linux I went with an arch install because I Googled “best version of Linux” and went with arch. Followed a guide to the point of drive formatting and I decided to go with a setup with drive encryption. I didn’t understand what I was doing, ended up locking myself out of my hard drives and couldn’t get windows to reinstall on them. I used a MacBook for a week until I installed Ubuntu and managed to wipe and reset my drives and reinstalled. Needless to say I am going to read up a little more before I try that again.

Before installing Arch on a USB flash drive, I disabled ext4 journaling in order to reduce disk reads and writes, being fully aware of the implications (file corruption after unexpected power loss). I was confident that I would never have to pull the plug or the drive without issuing a normal shutdown first. Unfortunately, there was one possibility I hadn’t considered: sometimes, there’s that one service preventing your PC from turning off, and at that stage there’s no way to kill it (besides waiting for systemd to time out, but I was impatient).

So I pulled the plug. The system booted fine, but was missing some binaries. Unfortunately, I couldn’t use pacman to restore them because some of the files it relied on were also destroyed.

This was not the last time I went through this. Luckily I’ve learned my lesson by now

Found out the hard way that if you edit /etc/sudoers with anything other than visudo you best be absolutely sure the syntax is correct, otherwise sudo will refuse to read it and you’ll be locked out.

Also learned to add -rf to the rm command at the end, after I re-read it to make sure it does what it should do. Something like rm /path -rf instead of rm -fr /path. That protects you from your fat fingers hitting the enter key half way through.

stupid was when I wanted to test Linux Mint on an external SSD, and didn’t check that the bootloader wasn’t going to overwrite my internal drive’s.

So anyway I’m running Linux Mint now.