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by guax 523 days ago
Thats a long time to spend in it. Likely stuck trying to quit vim.
4 comments

> Likely stuck trying to quit vim.

That's what a second terminal and "sudo killall -9 vi" is for.

He was installing Arch.
Arch is easy to install. I just wrote 200 or so lines of shell scripts to bootstrap it and hand the rest of the setup over to Ansible in a chroot.

/s in case

You joke but this is what I have on 3-4 machines that I maintain (a laptop and desktop each for work and personal). And it has saved my butt at least four to five in last 6 years when my drives failed.

While 4 to 5 times doesn't seem a lot, I was able to get back to full speed within two hours of my drives failing resulting in almost zero downtime.

I wasn’t knocking the setup, it is how I configure my machines as well.

I treat my machines as if they were disposable. Ready to be wiped and reloaded or forgotten on the bus at any moment.

Just the part where I refer to it as easy was supposed to be sarcastic, I suppose. I don’t expect everybody to want to put that effort out.

Can be done less than 1 minute! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5X9TWW8lXd0
How can you say that?! Install Gentoo and then speak. :)
I installed Slackware from floppies in a dorm room without Ethernet. Every time a disk turned out bad you had to restart. Down to the lab, make a new copy, back to my dorm, restart. I hated my life multiple hours before I got a clean boot. Jesus fucking Christ.

I think it was Debian that introduced an option to scan all the floppies before starting. I never went back.

Back in my day, I would have killed for a floppy after my 1/4" tape went bad an hour into installing SunOS 4.0.3 on a 3/60 workstation! (Also, see Monty Python "We were poor" sketch)
Luxury!
Nah it’s easy to quit vim:

ctrl-z, bg, killall vim

;-)

I wrote a MUD client when I was in high school and for some reason I forgot to document how to quit the app (which put the terminal in raw mode so normal interrupt commands didn't work). And the actual way to quit was completely different from every other application or feature in the client (you had to type Control-Y instead of /quit).

For years I got emails complaining about this. The common solution was to open up another window and send a kill command- except for most people, they weren't using a multiplexed windowing system, just a dumb terminal. So some folks basically got stuck for hours at a time.

Or

ctrl-z

kill %%

That is in tcsh, I would think bash has %% too.

ZZ

Or use tmux/zellij.

They actually mention this in the sixth paragraph