I accidentally untarred archive intended to be extracted in root directory, which among others included some files for /etc directory.
I went on to rm -rv ~/etc, but I quickly typed rm -rv /etc instead, and hit enter, while using a root account.
So good to see that, even in 2026, Unix Haters’ Handbook’s part on rm is still valid. See page 59 of the pdf
Dumbfuck logged in as root.
Things like these are right of passage on Linux :)
I chowned root recursively once to root:root caught it half way when errors started popping up about stuff that was denied. Was trying to do ./ but missed the .
alias rm=“rm -i”
alias rm=“echo no”
“Just a little off the top please”
Your first mistake was attempting to unarchive to / in the first place. Like WTF. Why would this EVER be a sane idea?
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 --overwriteI 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_configKeeps 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.
I assumed something like this. That’s a perfectly valid usecase for a tar extracted to /.
But I love it how people always jump to the assumption that the one on the other end is the stupid one
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
Its a pretty common Windows server practice to just throw random shit on the root directory of the server. I’m guilty of this at times when there isn’t a better option available to me, but I at least use a dedicated directory at the root for dumping random crap and organize the files within that directory (and delete unneeded files when done) so that it doesn’t create more work later.
What’s so bad about that? Except that is trigger me to not have it organized.
hard to properly set permissions and organize
Maybe they do and don’t fear the HFS? I mean do you use the HFS in a docker container?
This is why you should setup daily snapshots of your system volumes.
Btrfs and ZFS exist for a reason.
Wish ZFS didn’t constantly cause my proxmox to need to be forcefully restarted after the ZFS pool crashed randomly.
I get months of uptime on a ZFS NAS, though I’m not using Proxmox. I don’t think it’s the filesystem’s fault, you might have some hardware issue tbh. Do you have any logs?
I just reformatted back to ext after messing with it for about a month, been totally fine since.
I do also assume it was something screwy with how it was handling my consumer m2
I am running a zfs raidz1-0 pool on 3 consumer nvme in my workstation, doing crazy stuff on it.
Ran zfs under proxmox with enterprise nvme and had the same issue.
It is proxmox, not zfs
That or make your system immutable
That’s my current approach. Fedora Atomic, and let someone else break my OS instead of me.
TIL rm -v is a thing
Reusing names of critical system directories in subdirectories in your home dir.
I agree with this take, don’t wanna blame the victim but there’s a lesson to be learned.
except if you read the accompanying text they already stated the issue by accidentally unpacking an archive to their user directory that was intended for the root directory. that’s how they got an etc dir in their user directory in the first place
[OP] accidentally untarred archive intended to be extracted in root directory, which among others included some files for /etc directory.
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
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
I think the home directory version of etc is ~/.config as per xdg.
I use ~/config/* to put directories named the same as system ones. I got used to it in BeOS and brought it to LFS when I finally accepted BeOS wasn’t doing what I needed anymore, kept doing it ever since.
Well at least you got to watch
Welcome to the “I have shot myself in the foot with rm” club! Take a seat anywhere!
(Mine was trying to delete the old System 9 “System Folder” by typing rm -rf System\ Folder, but instead hitting the return key when it came time to hit the \, thereby starting a deletion of the running macOS 10 operating system inside the “System” folder. It got through the c’s in the second and a half or so before my frantic control-C attempts halted it. Amazingly, OS X would still boot, but no longer run Carbon apps, necessitating a complete OS reinstall, lol.)
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
Linux will do what you tell it. :)
HAH rookie, I once forgot the . before the ./
o.7
