I agree with this take, don’t wanna blame the victim but there’s a lesson to be learned.

[OP] accidentally untarred archive intended to be extracted in root directory, which among others included some files for /etc directory.

I dunno, ~/bin is a fairly common thing in my experience, not that it ends up containing many actual binaries. (The system started it, miss, honest. A quarter of the things in my system’s /bin are text based.)

~/etc is seriously weird though. Never seen that before. On Debians, most of the user copies of things in /etc usually end up under ~/.local/ or at ~/.filenamehere

Oh, my! Perfect use of that scene. I don’t always lol, when I say lol. But I lol’ed at this for real.

I’ll provide some cover. This is my current home directory: bin/ bmp/ cam/ doc/ eot/ hhc/ img/ iso/ mix/ mku/ mod/ mtv/ mus/ pkg/ run/ src/ tmp/ vid/ zim/. It’s your home directory, enjoy it however you like.

So, you don’t do backups of /etc? Or parts of it?

I have those tars dir ssh, pam, and portage for Gentoo systems. Quickset way to set stuff up.

And before you start whining about ansible or puppet or what, I need those maybe 3-4 times a year to set up a temporary hardened system.

But may, just maybe, don’t assume everyone is a fucking moron or has no idea.

Edit Or just read what op did, I think that is pretty much the same

Nvidia once did it in their install script

Is there any reason to use a root account?

if you just borked your /etc and need to rebuild because you don’t have sudo anymore

Would it? I think it would have just let you do it.

I don’t know if it should be a bad thing. Inside the tar archive the configs were already organized into their respective dirctories, this way with --preserve-permissions --overwrite I could just quickly add the desired versions of configs.
Some examples of contents:

-rw-r--r-- root/root      2201 2026-02-18 08:08 etc/pam.d/sshd
-rw-r--r-- root/root       399 2026-02-17 23:22 etc/pam.d/sudo
-rw-r--r-- root/root      2208 2026-02-18 09:13 etc/sysctl.conf
drwx------ user/user         0 2026-02-17 23:28 home/user/.ssh/
-rw------- user/user       205 2026-02-17 23:29 home/user/.ssh/authorized_keys
drwxrwxr-x user/user         0 2026-02-18 16:30 home/user/.vnc/
-rw-rw-r-- user/user        85 2026-02-18 15:32 home/user/.vnc/tigervnc.conf
-rw-r--r-- root/root      3553 2026-02-18 08:04 etc/ssh/sshd_config

Keeps permissions, keeps ownership, puts things where they belong (or copies from where they were), and you end up with a single file that can be stored on whatever filesystem.

Or press alt+. to paste final argument of previous command

This is also dangerous because you could run the second command by accident later when browsing command history

I’ve always just used gio trash (formerly gvfs-trash). KDE-based systems have something similar (but with syntax that’s perfectly logical but completely unsuitable, in my opinion).

The third party trash package works in places the GUI and the aforementioned GUI-related command line tools may not. I can’t tell whether this is a bug in trash or in the system tools, TBH.

For example, /tmp is one such directory where trash works but gio trash refuses.

Either way, the GUI Rubbish Bin won’t keep track if things are deleted from such places by trash.

To feel the thrill

Ok speaking of this, where do a distro’s config and boot scripts even come from? Are they in a package? Like on Debian so the .debs have metadata that can add cron jobs and such?