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).
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 18 2017, @07:40AM
Yep, I did a "chown -R [owner:group] .*" and learned the hard way it also ascends. I usually assume I'm the idiot but I think ascending is IDIOTIC behavior.
Also did "rm -rf .*" once trying to get rid of .mozilla and other dot-prefixed files and directories. Did a very fast crtl-C when it didn't finish as fast as I expected.