Well, THAT was stupid!

[Derek Broughton]

WJ Seidl wrote:

> Well, I guess I'm up for "Bonehead of the Year".

No, really, people have done much more boneheaded things than this :-)

My top was "sudo rm /etc /xxx" when it should have been /etc/xxx.  Oops...

> On the system I set up with Kubuntu Feisty, I had
> (originally) installed AVG antivirus, thinking I needed it.  Long story
> short, it kept hosing the system
> while I was trying to install ClamAV.  I had made AVG a member of the
> "root" group
> because of the error message that said I needed to make it a member of
> the group in order to run updates
> (it's back a while ago in the posts). Big mistake. (This is how newbies
> learn, I guess.)

I'm not sure how making AVG a member of "root" is the problem, though this
doesn't sound like the right way to do it.
> 
> Thinking I knew what I was doing (another big mistake), I went to Konsole
> and "sudo apt-get remove AVG*" believing that it would search out all
> AVG files and remove them.

# sudo apt-get -s remove AVG*
Password:
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Note, selecting libhsqldb-java-doc for regex 'AVG*'
...

Holy S**T!  What sort of regex parsing can treat AVG* as a match for
everything (it appears to have removed anything with an a, v or g in the
name, never mind the case)?  That's _really_ not your fault.  Though, note
the use of the "-s" option when I did it.  There's a lot to be said for
running simulations when you aren't sure what's going to happen.
> 
> Sigh.  Took almost everything away (DUH! of course, being a root member)

Well you have to be root to do the install, there's no way around that.

fwiw, aptitude behaves better (imo, aptitude almost always behaves better):

# sudo aptitude -s remove AVG*
...
Couldn't find package "AVG*", and more than 40
packages contain "AVG*" in their name.

> No more packages I had installed, etc. It even removed ClamAV. KDE still
> works, but it's limited.  Packages that installed into
> their own folders or different groups are still there, AFAIK. I see some
> of them from the K-menu.
> 
> Hindsight being 20/20 <g>....does anyone know how I can reformat the
> drive partition and
> start again? Specifically...will putting in the iso CD of Feisty I
> originally used offer me the option
> of reformatting during the re-install?  

Actually reformatting (at least the root filesystem) is the only way to do
the install.  If you have multiple partitions (like separate /home, /usr
or /var) you can have the install reuse some of the others without
reformatting, but it will tend to complain (with good reason).

> I guess recovery without having 
> made a backup is pretty much not an option.

# dpkg -i /var/cache/apt/archives/*.deb
 
may very well work, if you haven't been running the system long enough for
the apt archive to be cleaned.

> I'm finding this all very amusing.  It's like being a kid again with my
> first computer.

I remember that feeling very well from 10 years ago.  Come to think of it, I
remember that feeling from last week, too :-)
-- 
derek