Date: Sat, 2 Oct 2004 17:22:50 -0400 From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida@freebsd.org>, Lee Harr <missive@hotmail.com> Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Protection from the dreaded "rm -fr /" Message-ID: <p06110421bd84c87e063b@[128.113.24.47]> In-Reply-To: <20041002175704.GB2230@gothmog.gr> References: <BAY2-F27PUPeKljq65R00014185@hotmail.com> <20041002175704.GB2230@gothmog.gr>
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At 8:57 PM +0300 10/2/04, Giorgos Keramidas wrote: >On 2004-10-02 21:23, Lee Harr <missive@hotmail.com> wrote: > > > 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: > > >> How about: >> >> chflags sunlnk / >> ? > >Setting sunlink on / will only protect the / directory, not its >descendants, so you don't gain much. We could add a new flag "srunlnk", or maybe even "srm-r". The "rm" command will always have to stat() the file it is given (just to see if it is a directory), so it could check to see if this flag is turned on. If it is turned on, then 'rm' could refuse to honor any '-rf' request on that directory. I like the idea of *some* kind of protection for "rm -rf /", but I think it would be better as something more generally useful than protecting against that one single case. While I have typed in a few dozen disastrous "rm -rf" commands, I have never actually typed in "rm -rf /", so this particular seat belt would never have done me any good. By tieing the feature to a settable flag, then I would have the option to protect to other directories (if I wanted to add such protection). -- Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu Senior Systems Programmer or gad@freebsd.org Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or drosih@rpi.edu
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