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.

  • woelkchen@lemmy.world
    151·
    3 hours ago

    Your first mistake was attempting to unarchive to / in the first place. Like WTF. Why would this EVER be a sane idea?

    • u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)@lemmy.sdf.orgOPEnglish
      2·
      19 minutes ago

      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 --overwrite I 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_config

      Keeps 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.

      • vapeloki@lemmy.world
        2·
        7 minutes ago

        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

    • SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de
      6·
      2 hours ago

      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