strange automated path truncation with chmod

[dh-bugs]

hello

i faced a very strange behaviour with the coreutils 8.4 chmod tool:

i mounted a dvd-ram and didn't recognize that it was mounted read-only
(don't know why, actually). my first thought was that the access rights
to the files were set improper. because the disk stores only archival
stuff for everybody, and everybody means -I- on that system, i decided
to set universal access rights (a quick thought without much
investigation!) as root, i typed:

chmod -R 777 /media/*

interestingly, chmod didn't complain about the write-protection but,
instead, the root filesystem got accessed for several seconds. i did a
ctrl-c and found that chmod had actually done a:

chmod -R 777 /*

i can't explain this behaviour with common sense and consider it a bug.

regards, 
Dennis Heuer <address@hidden>