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Many years ago I wrote a backup script where I did "rm -rf /etc/" instead "cp -r /etc/ /mnt/whatever," not sure how I managed that. Took ages to figure out what

Many years ago I wrote a backup script where I did "rm -rf /etc/" instead "cp -r /etc/ /mnt/whatever," not sure how I managed that. Took ages to figure out what was causing /etc/ to disappear since /etc/ going missing often went unnoticed for awhile and I was running Arch back in the days when running pacman -syu always caused exciting things to happen. I even did a complete backup and reinstall trying to figure that one out, and I was extra cautious about making a backup of that backup script which I had spent so much time on and was fairly proud of since it was my first non-trivial bash script. I also once did "rm -rf /", was deleting a dir which started with a "[" and accidentally hit "enter" instead of "\." That one taught me the dangers of absolute paths. Edit: That last one is not quite right, would not have been an absolute path issue, that dir must have ended up in root somehow, can't quite remember the details, been too long.

Vilian 2y ago
Isn't absolute path better practice than relative paths?
- ofalkaed 2y ago
  In scripts, yes, but they are not without their dangers and can be especially troublesome when working in the terminal since almost no one types out and checks the full paths constantly, they just let tab completion take care of it and assume it worked. In scripts things like ../../../../file are a pain to read and assume everything in the script before all those previous dirs worked as it should have and everything is where it should be. Cd to an incorrect absolute path produces an error code so we can be sure we are in the proper dir, cd ../../../ will never produce an error and always succeeds even if you are at root.
  - 3np 2y ago
    > almost no one types out and checks the full paths constantly, they just let tab completion take care of it and assume it worked. Are you a bootcamp coach having watched countless of people at the terminal? What makes you assume this is a general habit?

Vilian 2y ago

Isn't absolute path better practice than relative paths?

ofalkaed 2y ago
In scripts, yes, but they are not without their dangers and can be especially troublesome when working in the terminal since almost no one types out and checks the full paths constantly, they just let tab completion take care of it and assume it worked. In scripts things like ../../../../file are a pain to read and assume everything in the script before all those previous dirs worked as it should have and everything is where it should be. Cd to an incorrect absolute path produces an error code so we can be sure we are in the proper dir, cd ../../../ will never produce an error and always succeeds even if you are at root.
- 3np 2y ago
  > almost no one types out and checks the full paths constantly, they just let tab completion take care of it and assume it worked. Are you a bootcamp coach having watched countless of people at the terminal? What makes you assume this is a general habit?