Date: Fri, 31 Jan 2003 08:47:39 +0100 From: Ruben de Groot <fbsd-q@bzerk.org> To: bastill@adam.com.au Cc: Lowell Gilbert <freebsd-questions-local@be-well.no-ip.com>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Ooops. Message-ID: <20030131074739.GA71255@ei.bzerk.org> In-Reply-To: <1043983614.3e39ecfecd509@webmail.adam.com.au> References: <005601c2c8c5$47735b10$6501a8c0@grant> <1043981504.3e39e4c0b6e66@webmail.adam.com.au> <44znpinhl7.fsf@be-well.ilk.org> <1043983614.3e39ecfecd509@webmail.adam.com.au>
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On Fri, Jan 31, 2003 at 01:56:54PM +1030, bastill@adam.com.au typed:
> 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.
The manpage rm(1) says:
The rm utility removes symbolic links, not the files referenced by the
links.
So what you describe shouldn't have happened.
There is one case where removing symlinks can be confusing:
rm -rf /home # removes only the symbolic link
rm -rf /home/ # removes directory tree /home is linked to
So what were the exact commands you issued?
>
> --
> Brian
>
>
>
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