I made a mistake. A massive one.

It was 02:14 AM. My eyes were burning, and my patience was thinner than a cheap HDMI cable. In a moment of “genius” frustration, I decided my Windows installation was too bloated. So I wiped it. All of it.

But I didn’t install Ubuntu or Mint. No. That would be too easy. I installed a minimal Linux distribution.

When it rebooted, I expected a desktop. Maybe a wallpaper. What I got was a void. A black screen. A single, blinking white cursor mocking my existence.

login: _

I typed my username. I typed my password. And then… silence. No Start menu. No Chrome. No mouse cursor to save me. Just a prompt waiting for a command I didn’t know how to give.

I felt like an astronaut whose tether just snapped. Floating in the dark.

The Identity Crisis (whoami)

Panic is a funny thing. It makes you forget your own name.

Sitting there in the dark, staring at user@localhost:~$, I genuinely doubted if I had logged in correctly. Was I root? Was I a ghost? Was I even in the system?

My first battle wasn’t compiling a kernel. It was simply asking the computer: “Do you know who I am?”

whoami

The screen spit back:

murat

Okay. Good. I exist.

It seems trivial. But in that moment of absolute digital isolation, seeing my name was the only tether I had.

Why did I use this? If I had been logged in as root, one wrong move could have nuked the system again. Turning a typo into a catastrophe. Knowing your identity isn’t just vanity; it’s a safety check.

The Analogy: Imagine waking up in a pitch-black room. The first thing you do is check your pockets. You touch your face. You make sure you are actually you. That’s whoami.

Where on Earth Am I? (pwd)

I exist, but I am lost.

The prompt showed ~. In Windows, I’m used to seeing C:\Users\Murat\Desktop. Here? Just a tilde.

I needed coordinates. I needed a GPS.

pwd

The output was instant:

/home/murat

Print Working Directory. My digital home address.

It hit me then. I wasn’t floating in space. I was in my “Home” folder. The / was the root of the building, home was the hallway, and murat was my room.

Bad Code vs Good Code: I initially tried to find where I was by blindly listing files to see if I recognized anything.

# The Panic Method (Bad)
ls
# (Output: empty)
ls -a
# (Output: .bashrc .profile)

This was stupid. It’s like trying to figure out what city you are in by looking at the carpet pattern in your hotel room. Just ask for the address. Use pwd.

The First 5 Minutes of Survival

I hadn’t moved a file. I hadn’t installed an app. I hadn’t even connected to the internet.

But by typing whoami and pwd, I established two critical facts:

  1. Identity: I am murat (not a god, just a user).
  2. Location: I am in /home/murat.

The panic subsided. The blinking cursor wasn’t mocking me anymore; it was waiting for orders.

I realized then that the terminal isn’t a limitation. It’s a conversation. And for the first time, I was the one starting it.

Next up? I need to find out if I have any stuff left, or if I really deleted everything. But that’s a panic attack for another time.

If I were doing this today: manual checks like whoami are great, but I’d likely customize my prompt (PS1) to always show my user and full path in bright red colors so I never have to ask again.

Now, you might be asking: Why didn’t you just reinstall Windows? Because comfort creates weakness. And I’m done being weak.

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