Stupidest thing you have done on a computer?

RomanNose · 5 Oct 2011 at 17:19

Last night I almost completely had to reinstall the os on one of my computers, luckily I managed to terminate the command before it did any damage but it was a close shave.

If anyone is interested , this was the command

Code:

chown -Rv user:user /

In the past I have also formatted the wrong disks which has caused a few disasters.

So GD, what stupid things have you done on computers?

RomanNose · 5 Oct 2011 at 17:24

Marvt74 said:
For the non Linux users what on earth does that do?

Quite simple actually.
In linux files have permissions assigned to them which controls what can be done to them. That command it changes the owner of the files to "user" and the group to "user" in the root file-system.
Usually all the files in the root filesystem belong to the user "root " and the group " root" and changing these to anything else will cause a lot of problems.

RomanNose · 5 Oct 2011 at 17:46

Oh yes, I did actually have a joystick catch fire before but it was a fault with the joystick.

RomanNose · 5 Oct 2011 at 22:09

paddy said:
That's what I used to do. It's neither sane or quick!!

Ctrl C or Ctrl Z will do.

RomanNose · 8 Oct 2011 at 23:10

EVH said:
Another.. remote configuring my HTPC via screen sharing over Wi-Fi. Decided I wanted to hard wire it instead, so was configuring the LAN settings when I decided to click "Turn off Wi-Fi" before I could click apply.

Had to dig out a monitor, and faff around. Muchos annoying.

Why would you have a headless HTPC?Isn't the point of HTPC's to display media through front end software i.e xbmc?