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/etc? Never heard of her. (thelemmy.club)
submitted 1 day ago by user224@lemmy.sdf.org to c/linuxmemes@lemmy.world
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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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[-] user224@lemmy.sdf.org 12 points 1 day ago

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 9 points 1 day 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

this post was submitted on 18 Feb 2026
536 points (99.1% liked)

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