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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.

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[-] partial_accumen@lemmy.world 3 points 2 months ago

Reusing names of critical system directories in subdirectories in your home dir.

[-] underscores@lemmy.zip 4 points 2 months ago

I agree with this take, don't wanna blame the victim but there's a lesson to be learned.

[-] neatchee@piefed.social 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

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

[-] palordrolap@fedia.io 0 points 2 months ago

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

[-] savvywolf@pawb.social 1 points 2 months ago

I think the home directory version of etc is ~/.config as per xdg.

this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
12 points (100.0% liked)

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