On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 07:10:41PM +0200, Tom Gundersen wrote: > On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 7:04 PM, Dave Reisner <[email protected]> wrote: > > Looking at the patch that triggered this, I'm confused as to why the > > logic was added to rc.sysinit to begin with. Why conditionally check for > > /tmp being mounted? What's the harm in unconditionally calling rm -rf > > /tmp/*? Has it bitten us in the past? The commit message doesn't even > > cover this change. > > The original change was completely stupid and will be reverted for the > next release (unless we skip the /tmp cleaning altogether). I had been > reading bug reports about being able to trick "rm /tmp/*" to delete > things outside of /tmp, but I am not able to reproduce it, so I guess > the bug reports were bogus. I hadn't intended for this change to be > pushed out (that's why it was not in the commit msg), but must have > been a bit too eager with the "git add -p"... > > -t
I can only think of 1 reason that would happen, and it's completely ridiculous: If you bind mount things into /tmp, then recursively deleting /tmp would nuke things on the mounts as well. I don't think there's a legitimate case for this though. rm does not follow symlinks, and my only other concern would be what happens when nullglob is set and the glob fails to expand-- but a quick test shows that not be a concern either. thanks, dave
