Dumb computer mistakes.

[loinburger]

I did something to screw up my CS account recently, but for the life of me I have no idea what it was. I was just re-compiling my pattern recognition assignment, and my machine crashed on me. No big deal, I think, I must have used up the working memory, and I'd saved backups of everything. So I go to log back on: "The home directory for that account does not exist." What the hell, thinks I?

So I figured that the problem might just be on that particular machine, and went to another machine in the lab. The previous machine had a single login screen (type in your username and password, hit enter), but the machine I moved to had two screens (type in your username, hit enter, you go to another screen where you type in your password). So I type in my username, and the machine immediately crashes. ****.

So I go to a different lab -- same deal, the machine crashes as soon as I type in my login. This being 4:30 on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend, the entire CS support staff was gone, and the regular University support staff was clueless ("Your CS account? Those are Unix machines, right? Sorry, can't help you, talk to the CS support staff"). At this point I figured that I'd somehow wiped my account, but hey, that just gave me a decent excuse to go home and get drunk. I sure as hell wasn't going to get any work done, now that I had the Midas Touch...

Forty hours later my account was back to normal, as if nothing had ever happened. I've still got no clue what I did to crash my account. Oh well...

[Giancarlo]

The dumbest thing I did was plugging in a 120 V power supply into a 220 V plug socket here in Argentina.. room was filled with smoke..

[St Leo]

The classic Unix mistake would be typing "rm * .cpp" instead of "rm *.cpp".

[Giancarlo]

Originally posted by St Leo
The classic Unix mistake would be typing "rm * .cpp" instead of "rm *.cpp".

What would that do?

[Asher]

the first one deletes everything, the second deletes all files ending in .cpp

[Urban Ranger]

I read somewhere that a relly bright fellow thought the CD drive was a coffee cup holder, then be broke it one day

[JCG]

My using one of those "unwise.exe" uninstall programs, choosing a custom uninstallation setup, and then sit idly by while all the files not in use under c:\program files\ were sent to oblivion.

Oops.

Spent at least a month or so before I managed to get substitutes for the preinstalled software that made the CD-R drive and Windows Media Player work....Ahh, the wonders of filesharing.

[Kassiopeia]

When I was a wee lad (that is, something like four years ago...) I decided in a fit of complete stupidity to lock down the computer through the BIOS with a password. My idea, as I recall it, was to just to be a little nuisance to my little sister who usually got home from school before me and thus occupied the computer.

And what do you know, I go and forget this crucial password. Luckily there was this guy my father knew who at the time helped us out with the computer - taught me how to reinstall Windows, how to get the soundcard drivers and the modem working, that sort of stuff - and he twiddled around with the motherboard's jumpers and managed to get the BIOS to stop asking for the password.

That's the stupidest thing I'll admit to doing.

[Giancarlo]

Oh and I deleted autoexec.bat before.. oops.. When I had windows 98.. now that was dumb

[Ben Kenobi]

Back in the good old pre-PC days we sold a system that required the user to hit Ctrl-A in order to sign on. We sold one to some outfit in Canada. Well, trying to get them going over the phone took an hour. We'd say, "Hit Ctrl-A," and they'd say, "Ok, we hit Ctrl, eh? And nothing happened, eh?"

A Canadian classic.

[Fve Crathva]

The stupidest thing I ever did was to read through the entire Debian Potato package list (over 3000 packages), and track dependencies for a working installation on a piece of paper (I was totally new to Linux at the time). I worked out a list of packages I would need, and gave it to my dad for him to download at his work, where he had access to a fast connection and a CD burner. It didn't work, of course (although I think I would be able to get it to work with what I know now), so I gave up and bought Debian on CD. I learned a hell of a lot while reading it, though. For one, I realised half-way through what the package descriptions which mentioned 'X11' were referring to (I had thought that X was equivalent to Debian, from the context in some early packages).

SP

[Dr. A. Cula]

A very long time ago, when I was in high school, the computer lab got it's first 286 PCs with harddrives, a real wonder back then. A few friends and I were already into computer games so we decided to see what we could play on this machine (we were already exchanging tapes for the Z80). We managed to get a floppy from somewhere and when we put in into the drive, it was filled with zipped files. We asked the teacher for help and she showed us how to unzip them and left us alone. What she didn't tell us was to create a temporary directory and unzip there, so we unzipped all the games into the root of C:\. After playing around for a while, we decided the games weren't interesting and erased all the files, including the system files. The teacher had also forgotten to set up Norton Commander to hide OS files. Gone were command.com, msdos.sys and io.sys. Soon enough, some bright spark in the lab hit the power off switch and, of course, nothing worked. It turned out there was a system floppy, but it was safely locked away and the only person with the key was on holyday. No more computer classes for a week!
Another thing happened when I went to university, but this time it wasn't me. They had a policy of keeping 1st year students on cheap old 286 diskless machines networked to a server with a harddisk. The professors thought it would minimise losses. The problem was that the server looked like any other work station. One day, every workstation in the lab was occupied and someone walked in and sat down at the only available "station". He turned on the monitor, saw a lot of strange looking things there, realised the keyboard was locked and decided the workstation had crashed. Before anyone realised what he was doing, he turn the power off to the server. On restart, the server truncated to zero every file that was open. Fortunately for him, only 1st year students were using this network and all the work lost could be recovered in week.
But the most stupid thing I have ever done was about 2 years ago, when I moved to another country and decided to ship my (desktop) computer as well, by mail, with 2 (two) hard disks still inside. The romanian postal services blissfully ignore "handle with care" signs, so you do the math.

[Ari Rahikkala]

Weell... once when I was playing around with stuff I didn't really know about much in Gentoo, I think I set the variable that set the temporary directory used for building packages to something it shouldn't be in one ebuild... trying to use that ebuild resulted in my /bin getting completely deleted and some stuff in /lib being destroyed (fortunately no critical libraries were deleted). After thinking for a while (and asking for Ignorance to share a /bin directory for me over ftp) I noticed I still had scp so I just copied my school's server's /bin over to my computer . I wouldn't really call it an act of stupidity, it was really caused by lack of discretion and knowledge...

I forgot that when you exit bash, it sends you back to your home directory.

Was the instance of bash with the nice colours a subshell of the shell that you were going to write the the script in? AFAIK bash doesn't send you anywhere when you exit from it, but it would be pretty logical to assume that the login shell (the one without colours) would be in your home directory regardless of where the subshell is... and obviously, if you want to use UNIX, you should just learn to remember things like this .