How not to use the filesystem

Sun Nov 4, 2018 · 261 words · 2 min

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Today, I probably did the most stupid thing I have ever done on a Linux machine.

But let's start from the beginning, how the story unfold:

How not to use rustup's filesystem layout

rustup (by default) installs toolchains under ~/.rustup and all the important binaries are available under ~/.cargo. Because I am having some trouble with getting Android Studio to reach my Rust toolchain, I tried to symlink all binaries in ~/.cargo/bin to /usr/bin. I knew this was going to be bad practice, I did it anyway. Only to realize that this hack did not work and now I wanted to revert my changes. But how? Easy right: Just remove all files beginning with cargo or rust and any other file (read: symlink) from ~/.cargo/bin. Now one can see how bad my decision was to just 'try it out' and symlink all those files.

How not to remove files

For my 'fix' to work, I would obviously have to use sudo. Thus, extra caution is necessary. But now see what I did:

What I wanted to do:

sudo rm cargo*

What I did instead:

sudo rm cargo *

...

So, basically, I just deleted everything in /usr/bin.

Seriously, that's how I just broke my system.

What we learned

1. NEVER 'try this out' when you modify your system level filesystem
2. ALWAYS backup your system
3. ALWAYS read your command twice if it combines rm and sudo
4. even better: use something like rm -i or trash-cli