Errors To Avoid

There are errors take may take days to recover from, or may be unrecoverable. Mentors would be wise to have their students know of this list to save precious time and aggravation.

• Never interrupt Portupgrade. Recovery may take days of work/compile and isn't always a success.

• Never delete directly from /usr/ports and its subdirectories. If you delete even a small and silly game with no dependencies, you can still break things as some package might require it. To save space the command you probably intended is "make clean" or "make distclean"; the latter will clean /usr/ports/distfiles and any packages that were built for your system.

• Never forget to take notes when your mentor walks you thru a complicated and risky process. If he won't give you the time to write it down, check your Logs later.

• Make sure your backups are up to date before doing anything risky to your system!

• Check for other lists like this one on the net. Knowledge of what to avoid is crucial if mentor/technician patience is limited.