Protection from the dreaded "rm -fr /"

[David Schultz]

On Sat, Oct 02, 2004, Michael Reifenberger wrote:
> 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.

Do you also want to be able to swap to the root partition while
it's mounted?  We can bring back that feature, too.  But
personally, I don't see anything wrong with the view that
operations that are guaranteed to shoot people in the foot should
be disallowed.