On Oct 24, 2012, at 11:49 AM, Jonathan Billings <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 24, 2012 at 11:44:59AM -0400, Derek Balling wrote: >> "-r" ... so it recursively runs the command against anything marked >> as a directory,... which ".." satisfies. So it would recursively go >> "into" the .. directory tree, and then delete whatever >> files/directories were in that directory. Lather, rinse, repeat. > > I am not aware of how the early implementations worked, but if this > were the case, wouldn't "rm -r somedir/" detect somedir/.. and then > progressively remove the entire filesystem? Or was there an error in > the logic where it would ignore .. in the recursive walk down the > directories, but they forgot to ignore .. in the program's parameters? OK, I'm not going to pretend I understand at the "code" level how it happened. I just know that this is not apocryphal. I have personally destroyed an entire web-hosting company's HTML directory-tree in about 1.5 seconds. :-) D _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
