Warning to those who copy-paste commands directly to the Terminal

[jerenept]

Don't. Seriously. It's trivial to completely destroy your system this way. UbuntuForums should be safe, however, blogs and the like may not. Always paste into a text editor and make sure what you're going to run is safe before running.

[CharlesA]

Interesting use of span tags...

Oh yeah, don't forget sometimes things you find on blogs are old and sometimes don't work the way you think they do.

For example, I was trying to set up a mail server on my VPS and ran into a tutorial on how to do that without using MySQL, except some of the packages they said needed to be installed were no longer available, so apt-get threw an error.

[Linuxratty]

I don't. I only have people help me at Linux Internationals. If i were going to copy paste something i would always check with my betters at LI to make sure it's safe.

[samsom63]

Thanks for the advice!!

[Rochambo]

How Intriguing.

How does this work, exactly?

[wojox]

Interesting use of span tags...

<!-- Oh noes, you found it! -->

[CharlesA]

<!-- Oh noes, you found it! -->

Indeed!.

[coldcritter64]

Don't. Seriously. It's trivial to completely destroy your system this way. UbuntuForums should be safe, however, blogs and the like may not. Always paste into a text editor and make sure what you're going to run is safe before running.

I checked the git clone copy/pastes in a text editor before running in terminal; WOW, a real eyeopener to what could happen. Thanks for the tip, that just changed my installing habits from blogs etc in the future; I had no idea of that danger till now. Cheers.

[forrestcupp]

I remember several years ago when some people on here were posting commands to delete people's hard drive partitions. It doesn't have to be anything advanced at all. You just have to have someone new and trusting who doesn't know what they're doing, and you could do a lot of damage.

We haven't had any of that kind of trouble here for a very long time. But like the OP said, you can't just trust every random blog out there. CharlesA also made a good point that a lot of stuff that comes up in searches on the net are old and don't work anymore.

[wojox]

You just have to have someone new and trusting who doesn't know what they're doing, and you could do a lot of damage.

or just plain lazy like me.