SoylentNews
SoylentNews is people
https://soylentnews.org/

Title    systemd 256.1: Now Slightly Less Likely to Delete /home
Date    Saturday June 22 2024, @10:05PM
Author    hubie
Topic   
from the dept.
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=24/06/22/0211259

owl writes:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/20/systemd_2561_data_wipe_fix/

Following closely after the release of version 256, version 256.1 fixes a handful of bugs. One of these is emphatically not systemd-tmpfiles recursively deleting your entire home directory. That's a feature.

The 256.1 release is now out, containing some 38 minor changes and bugfixes. Among these are some changes to the help text around the systemd-tmpfiles command, which describes itself as a tool to "Create, delete, and clean up files and directories." Red Hat's RHEL documentation describes it as a tool for managing and cleaning up your temporary files.

That sounds innocuous enough, right?

It isn't, as Github user jedenastka discovered on Friday. He filed bug #33349 and the description makes for harrowing reading, not just because of the tool's entirely intended behavior, but also because of the systemd maintainers' response, which could be summarized as "you're doing it wrong".


Original Submission

Links

  1. "owl" - https://soylentnews.org/~owl/
  2. "256.1 release" - https://github.com/systemd/systemd/compare/v256...v256.1
  3. "systemd-tmpfiles" - https://www.freedesktop.org/software/systemd/man/latest/systemd-tmpfiles.html
  4. "describes it" - https://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/09/20/managing-temporary-files-with-systemd-tmpfiles-on-rhel7#
  5. "jedenastka" - https://github.com/jedenastka
  6. "bug #33349" - https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/33349
  7. "Original Submission" - https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=63092

© Copyright 2026 - SoylentNews, All Rights Reserved

printed from SoylentNews, systemd 256.1: Now Slightly Less Likely to Delete /home on 2026-03-15 18:47:03