From: jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu (Noel Chiappa)
Subject: [TUHS] There is turmoil in Linux-land - When did rm first avoid going upwards?
Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2017 18:06:03 -0400 (EDT) [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20170424220603.883CB18C0D0@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> (raw)
> From: Josh Good
> Would the command "cd /tmp ; rm -rf .*" be able to kill a V6 ... system?
Looking at the vanilla 'rm' source for V6, it cannot/does not delete
directories; one has to use the special 'rmdir' command for that. But,
somewhat to my surprise, it does support both the '-r' and '-f' flags, which I
thought were later. (Although not as 'stacked' flags, so you'd have to say
'rm -r -f'.)
So, assuming one did that, _and_ (important caveat!) _performed that command
as root_, it probably would empty out the entire directory tree. (I checked,
and "cd /tmp ; echo .*" evaluates to ". .." on V6.
Noel
next reply other threads:[~2017-04-24 22:06 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 31+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2017-04-24 22:06 Noel Chiappa [this message]
2017-04-24 22:18 ` Josh Good
2017-04-24 23:23 ` Kurt H Maier
2017-04-24 23:59 ` [TUHS] was turmoil, moving to rm -rf / Larry McVoy
2017-04-25 0:44 ` Dan Cross
2017-04-25 14:02 ` Clem Cole
2017-04-25 14:08 ` Larry McVoy
2017-04-25 14:12 ` Álvaro Jurado
2017-04-25 14:29 ` arnold
2017-04-25 14:31 ` Álvaro Jurado
2017-04-25 16:28 ` Pete Turnbull
2017-04-27 23:44 ` Steve Johnson
2017-04-27 23:54 ` Ron Natalie
2017-04-28 3:04 ` Toby Thain
2017-04-28 5:19 ` arnold
[not found] ` <mailman.198.1493337336.3780.tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
2017-04-28 14:48 ` John Floren
2017-04-25 14:18 ` Clem Cole
2017-04-25 15:28 ` Dan Cross
2017-04-25 17:56 ` Bakul Shah
2017-04-25 14:19 ` Corey Lindsly
2017-04-25 0:06 ` [TUHS] There is turmoil in Linux-land - When did rm first avoid going upwards? Ron Natalie
2017-04-25 0:18 ` Kurt H Maier
2017-04-25 0:22 ` ron minnich
2017-04-25 0:24 ` Kurt H Maier
2017-04-25 0:26 ` ron minnich
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2017-04-25 1:34 Noel Chiappa
2017-04-25 0:59 Noel Chiappa
2017-04-24 21:42 Josh Good
2017-04-24 21:48 ` Alec Muffett
2017-04-24 21:59 ` Arthur Krewat
2017-04-24 22:10 ` Kurt H Maier
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=20170424220603.883CB18C0D0@mercury.lcs.mit.edu \
--to=jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).