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Date: Sat, 2 Oct 2004 14:50:55 -0400
From: David Schultz <das@FreeBSD.ORG>
To: Michael Reifenberger <mike@Reifenberger.com>
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	Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@freebsd.org>, freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
References: <20041002081928.GA21439@gothmog.gr>
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cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
cc: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject: Re: Protection from the dreaded "rm -fr /"
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On Sat, Oct 02, 2004, Michael Reifenberger wrote:
> On Sat, 2 Oct 2004, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
> 
> >Date: Sat, 2 Oct 2004 11:19:28 +0300
> >From: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@freebsd.org>
> >To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org
> >Subject: Protection from the dreaded "rm -fr /"
> >
> >John Beck, who works for Sun, has posted an entry in his blog yesterday
> >about "rm -fr /" protection, which I liked a lot:
> >http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jbeck/20041001#rm_rf_protection
> >
> >His idea was remarkably simple, so I went ahead and wrote this patch for
> >rm(1) of FreeBSD:
> >
> 
> This does only help for the obvious case of '/' but not for the
> './' and '../' or '../../' ... accidents.
> 
> Furthermore does it prevent root from doing `rm -rf /` which is a pretty
> legal operation for root since he knows what he is doing.
> 
> This is UNIX, not Windows.

Do you also want to be able to swap to the root partition while
it's mounted?  We can bring back that feature, too.  But
personally, I don't see anything wrong with the view that
operations that are guaranteed to shoot people in the foot should
be disallowed.