pertinent and coherent article. I agree with it all, from experience. excellent and none of the usual homesy motivational nonsense.
Unfortunately, I think it might have spent a little bit too much time on the bicycling part of the story...
I'm considering rewriting it and submitting it again tomorrow...I think it's an important thing to remember (that screwing up and doing it wrong is how you learn) :)
when some friends, relatively new to unix, asked me various questions, I asked them what would happen if they did:
cd /; rm -fr /
I then suggested that, just to make sure they understood the consequences, they do this on basic Linux virtual machine so they could break the machine as much as they needed. illustrative, useful and they never felt they needed to do it again. bruises and cuts have their place :)
gibson:/# mv * .jpg /var/www/html/images/
ooooops.
I moved my entire directory structure into /var/www/html/images/
No /bin, no /lib, nothing.
Calling things with an absolute path, a la /var/www/html/imagse/bin/ls
gave me:
/lib/ld-linux.so.2: bad ELF interpreter: No such file or directory
Eventually, I figured out that calling:
/var/www/html/lib/ld-linux.so.2 --library-path /var/www/html/lib /var/www/html/bin/ln -s /var/www/html/lib /lib
Would let me rebuild the system by mving things back to their proper location.
After that, any problems I encountered seemed trivial.