Why is deleting answers discouraged?

Question

I deleted two answers of mine, because after some thinking I came to the conclusion those answers were not very good and/or not really my field of expertise:

1. how to allocate more storage for home directory?

Edit: I agree with [kba](https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/261944/151927) that using a partition manager to increase your home partition is not a good idea in your particular setup, because you would need to move your boot partition sda8 and that might cause problems. 

I have no idea how LVM works. That is why I cannot help you that much.

One last thing: You might want to consider using sda5 which has 800gb as your home partition if that is possible.


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You can increase the size of the partition where your /home directory is with a partition manager like gparted.

Since you already have linux installed, I would make a gparted Live USB key manually with the instructions on the following site: http://gparted.org/liveusb.php#linux-method-b

I recommend this method, because the other methods to create a Live USB key sometimes don't work (gparted won't boot).

Alternatively you can create a Ubuntu Live USB key with any version of unetbootin (Windows or linux version). It has gparted preinstalled.

I hope I understood your question right.

If you need more detailed instructions, I would gladly provide it.

2. What does pwd output?

I will answer my own question.

No, at the beginning of a shell script `pwd` returns the directory from which the shell script containing `pwd` is executed. This can be any folder in the computer. In the script you can call `cd` to enter different directories which changes the `pwd` to the directory the script entered.

They are bad answers and/or there were better answers, so I deleted them to improve the quality of this site. Why did I get minus 20 reps for them, and now I am stuck not being able to answer questions where I do have expertise, because I cannot ask for more details with comments?

Answer 1

You don't directly get or lose any reputation from deleting posts, but it does cancel out the reputation those posts gave. One of the answers was at +1/-0 upvotes/downvotes, and the other was +1/-1, so you'd received 18 rep total from those posts. You lose that rep when they're deleted, I assume because it would be odd to give credit for something that was undone. There's even a badge for deleting an answer you decide was bad even though it was upvoted, but yours weren't upvoted enough to qualify for it.

Fortunately, you're only a couple upvotes away from being able to comment again.