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Re: rm patch suggestion


From: Niels Möller
Subject: Re: rm patch suggestion
Date: 08 May 2002 00:01:09 +0200
User-agent: Gnus/5.09 (Gnus v5.9.0) Emacs/21.2

Marcus Brinkmann <Marcus.Brinkmann@ruhr-uni-bochum.de> writes:

> This problem should, for traditional Unix usage, only crop up in two
> situations: Removing files in /tmp, removing a user's home directory (or
> files in there).  Both is only commonly done by the sysadmin, who will not
> find it hard to learn the one new option to rm to make these safe operations
> (of course, it should be visibly documented in the Hurd docs).

I think there are other cases as well, in particular with with group
writable directories. For example, consider rm -rf
/usr/local/share/emacs/20.7, where all of /usr/local is writable by
the staff group.

Sure, it's reasonable to assume that you haven't given malicious users
write access to /usr/local, but you could still do some unexpected
damage if some other user have installed translators in the tree (e.g.
say some shadowfs-thing installed somewhere in the site-lisp
directory). You don't want to accidentally mess with that, just
because you think emacs 20.7 is obsolete and should be purged from the
system.

In this case, either failing with an error, or automatically detaching
translators, would be closer to the Right Thing.

Regards,
/Niels



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