Follow-up from “Dumbest Thing you have done distro-hopping?”.
Here’s mine - the laptop from which I’m typing right now has a broken touchpad that keeps jumping and clicking randomly, and does not work. Well, I can’t afford to fix it, but at the moment, I was so pissed off I punched the touchpad really hard, and the machine panicked with all the lights blinking. A few more revival abuses, and the machine was back to life, but since I was running a nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade in the background, I blew off my boot partition. I think I just broke the unbreakable distro.


This one is from a coworker. He noticed there was a file named
~inside his home. Decided to delete it. Sorm -rf ~.Am I your coworker? In my case the dir was created by a poorly written Python script. I just banged out the rm -rf from muscle memory without pause.
Oh man, I did that too. Reminded me that I should always keep a backup.
Creating a file named ~ used to be a prank to teach others not to leave their pc unattended and logged in.
I did this in my development environment at work! Luckily they take backups every 15 minutes.
What does that do, is this a del * equivalent?
Your essentially telling your terminal to delete everything starting at your home directory, folder structure be damned
~is a “aliás” to your user home directory. If you are anywhere and want to copy something into your documents folder you can docp file.txt ~/Documentsinstead ofcp file.txt /home/username/DocumentsSo by typing rm
~it actually deleted the/home/usernamedirectory instead of the~file in it.I think
rm '~'does delete the file.