Protection from the dreaded "rm -fr /"

Michael Reifenberger mike at Reifenberger.com
Sat Oct 2 01:34:27 PDT 2004


On Sat, 2 Oct 2004, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:

> Date: Sat, 2 Oct 2004 11:19:28 +0300
> From: Giorgos Keramidas <keramida at freebsd.org>
> To: freebsd-hackers at freebsd.org
> Subject: Protection from the dreaded "rm -fr /"
> 
> John Beck, who works for Sun, has posted an entry in his blog yesterday
> about "rm -fr /" protection, which I liked a lot:
> http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jbeck/20041001#rm_rf_protection
>
> His idea was remarkably simple, so I went ahead and wrote this patch for
> rm(1) of FreeBSD:
>

This does only help for the obvious case of '/' but not for the
'./' and '../' or '../../' ... accidents.

Furthermore does it prevent root from doing `rm -rf /` which is a pretty
legal operation for root since he knows what he is doing.

This is UNIX, not Windows.

Bye/2
---
Michael Reifenberger, Business Development Manager SAP-Basis, Plaut Consulting
Comp: Michael.Reifenberger at plaut.de | Priv: Michael at Reifenberger.com
       http://www.plaut.de           |       http://www.Reifenberger.com



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