this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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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 61 points 7 hours ago (4 children)

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

    [–] underscores@lemmy.zip 24 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

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

    [–] neatchee@piefed.social 26 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours 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

    [–] vapeloki@lemmy.world 0 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

    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

    [–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 3 points 5 hours ago

    [OP] accidentally untarred archive intended to be extracted in root directory, which among others included some files for /etc directory.

    [–] palordrolap@fedia.io 3 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

    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 5 points 6 hours ago

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

    [–] db2@lemmy.world 1 points 6 hours ago

    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.