Aleksey Tsalolikhin <[email protected]> wrote: > A new user I knew was trying to clean out some old accounts on a system > he was given. As root, he changed directories to one of the old user > directories, and then did 'rm -r *' but noticed it left a directory > called .X11 behind. To get rid of it, and to be sure it wouldn't fail, > he did 'rm -rf .*'. Sad to say he didn't realize that '.*' could and > would expand into '..', and it would continue to do so recursively.
Did early versions of (any) Unix really behave this way? I don't see how: '.*' is expanded by the shell at command invocation time. That does in fact get expanded to include '.' and '..', but it does not recursively expand to '../.' and '../..' etc. Today's unix versions tend to agree that a user cannot remove '.' and '..', and NetBSD's earliest import from March 1993 also includes this explicit check (http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/bin/rm/rm.c?rev=1.1). -Jan
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