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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: 3, Touché) by cubancigar11 on Tuesday April 18 2017, @05:45AM (2 children)

    by cubancigar11 (330) on Tuesday April 18 2017, @05:45AM (#495696) Homepage Journal

    And does rm_rf() call rm -rf or does it try to implement it internally?

    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @03:14PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @03:14PM (#495876)

    What do you think? If it called the system rm would this bug report ever have been opened?

    I don't get it, why are you hung up on the name of the function call?

    Its like people are so amped up to bag on poettering that you all are willing to lose your shit over tiniiest thing.
    Ermagad somebody on the internet made a dumb comment!
    Should you be judged by every dumbass comment you've made?

    • (Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Wednesday April 19 2017, @03:17AM

      by cubancigar11 (330) on Wednesday April 19 2017, @03:17AM (#496122) Homepage Journal

      I have no interest in the name I am talking about duplicating functionality and breaking it - which is basically the biggest problem everyone has with systemd and poettring.

      Seriously, systemd is GPLv2 and there are enough version of coreutils in GPLv2 to not implement it again.