"How not to upgrade PEAR" (a la Monty Python)

Just a few minutes ago, I was attempting to downgrade my existing PEAR to an earlier version so that I might be able to test a few things. So, via

$ pear up -f PEAR

I figured I would get the 1.4.0a12. Unfortunately, I forgot that my preferred_state was set to "stable" and ignored the error message, trying again. Halfway through, I realized my mistake - I was upgrading to 1.3.6, which would bork everything. So, I reflexively hit Ctrl-C. Uh-oh. A quick peek at the disk revealed that I had hosed the entire installation . Thinking this was going to be a bit harder to fix, I suddenly remembered that I have a convenient go-pear.phar sitting there that will install PEAR 1.4.0b1, so I did this.

It worked great, except instead of installing into C:\Program Files\php\PEAR as I thought I asked it to do, it instead installed into C:\Program Files\php\PEAR\PEAR. Crap. After a bit of hand-deleting and a re-run, I have my PEAR installation back again.

I guess the moral of the story is it doesn't matter how experienced you are with a program, read the damn error messages and prompts!