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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: 1) by DeVilla on Tuesday April 18 2017, @03:16AM

    by DeVilla (5354) on Tuesday April 18 2017, @03:16AM (#495660)

    I've heard stories of Admins from the DOS/Win32 world who would be forced into the UNIX world and as root, on a system with root access over NFS would run:

            cd /tmp
            rm -rf *.*

    Actually it would be 'del -rf' because people would actually alias up del, dir, etc. And yes, once this would delete everything until the system hung or crashed.