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Systemd-implementation of "rm -rf" Buggy, Could Erase Root Partition

posted by cmn32480 on Monday April 17 2017, @08:34PM   Printer-friendly
from the people-that-live-in-a-bubble dept.

Soylentbob writes:

Edit: The link.

There were lots of good titles for this submission, as in "Breaking news: Poettering clueless?" to finally disprove Betteridge's law, or "systemd surprisingly not as good as advertised" or "Breaking new: systemd broken" or "Poettering censors critics after epic fail".

Systemd implementation of "rm -rf .*" will follow ".." to upper directory and erase /

How to reproduce:
        # mkdir -p /foo/dir{1,2}

        # touch /foo/.bar{1,2}

        # cat /etc/tmpfiles.d/test.conf

        R! /foo/.* - - - - -

        Reboot.

After the issue was fixed, finally Poettering added this gem of wisdom:

I am not sure I'd consider this much of a problem. Yeah, it's a UNIX pitfall, but "rm -rf /foo/.*" will work the exact same way, no?

The answer to this question, as many clarified for him, obviously is a loud "NO!". After being told a couple of times in no uncertain terms, the thread was closed for non-developers

poettering locked and limited conversation to collaborators 4 hours ago

for which I proposed the "freedom-of-speech" department (although I admit it is a weak proposal).

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday April 18 2017, @09:00AM (1 child)

    by TheRaven (270) on Tuesday April 18 2017, @09:00AM (#495758) Journal
    Not quite undelete, but the FreeBSD installer now defaults to ZFS, which has constant-time snapshotting and the installer sets up boot environments so that it's trivial to snapshot a bootable state. There are a bunch of utilities in the package collection that do automatic snapshotting of user directories too (for example, keep hourly snapshots for a day, daily snapshots for a week, weekly snapshots for a month, or whatever policy the user chooses).
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  • (Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday April 18 2017, @07:43PM

    by edIII (791) on Tuesday April 18 2017, @07:43PM (#495983)

    That's pretty cool. Now if they can just get ZFS into OpenBSD....

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