Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2003 13:56:54 +1030 From: bastill@adam.com.au To: Lowell Gilbert <freebsd-questions-local@be-well.no-ip.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Ooops. Message-ID: <1043983614.3e39ecfecd509@webmail.adam.com.au> In-Reply-To: <44znpinhl7.fsf@be-well.ilk.org> References: <005601c2c8c5$47735b10$6501a8c0@grant> <1043981504.3e39e4c0b6e66@webmail.adam.com.au> <44znpinhl7.fsf@be-well.ilk.org>
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Quoting Lowell Gilbert <freebsd-questions-local@be-well.no-ip.com>:
> bastill@adam.com.au writes:
> Can you explain what you think is a problem?
Well - it's happened to two uf us in the past month!
In both cases the operator was copying files from one drive to another and
wished to delete files from the second drive on which the copy resided. In
both cases rm -rf removed both copy AND source! :-(
In my case I was setting up a larger hard drive from a smaller one using
dump/restore, partition by partition. I had just completed copying one smallish
partition and began copying the next, larger partition having forgotten to
change directories. Naturally I soon ran out of room. ("Bother", said Pooh).
No problem, I'll delete the wrongly copied directories from that smaller
partition, move to the larger one, and try again. Unfortunately, rm -rf home
removed home from the source /usr directory as well! :-( I presume that this
was due to /home being a symlink to /usr/home, and somehow that link remained,
so that -r referred to everything below the symlink as well as to the directory
I was trying to remove.
Whatever the explanation, IMHO rm -r should NOT do this by default.
--
Brian
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