On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 11:30 AM, Jan Schaumann <[email protected]>wrote:
> > 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: > Yes, they did; mostly 7th Research Edition and the AT&T releases. Possibly also early BSD; the behavior you think of as normative was canonical by 4.2BSD, but I don't know how far back in the BSD lineage it was introduced. (You were aware that Unix is much older than NetBSD? There's a reason the clock starts in 1970.) I will note here that one of the first machines I worked on required you to make configuration changes by relinking the kernel. If you forgot to specify an output name, it used the empty string, which mapped to ., passing this to ld; since you had to do this as root, and being a System III derivative . and .. were normal links that root was allowed to replace/overwrite, forgetting the output file name resulted in the kernel build directory partially detaching itself from the filesystem tree. Luckily root could use /etc/link to fix it.... -- brandon s allbery kf8nh sine nomine associates [email protected] [email protected] unix/linux, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure http://sinenomine.net
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