this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
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    /etc? Never heard of her. (i.imgflip.com)
    submitted 9 hours ago by user224@lemmy.sdf.org to c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world
    90 comments fedilink hide all child comments
     

    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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    [–] woelkchen@lemmy.world 19 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

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

    [–] user224@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

    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 5 points 2 hours 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 7 points 3 hours ago (3 children)

    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

    [–] Trainguyrom@reddthat.com 1 points 2 hours ago

    Its a pretty common Windows server practice to just throw random shit on the root directory of the server. I'm guilty of this at times when there isn't a better option available to me, but I at least use a dedicated directory at the root for dumping random crap and organize the files within that directory (and delete unneeded files when done) so that it doesn't create more work later.

    [–] captcha_incorrect@lemmy.world 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

    What's so bad about that? Except that is trigger me to not have it organized.

    [–] SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 2 points 3 hours ago

    hard to properly set permissions and organize

    [–] DmMacniel@feddit.org 1 points 3 hours ago

    Maybe they do and don't fear the HFS? I mean do you use the HFS in a docker container?