[Off Topic] Re: Linux security

[Peter Garrett]

On Fri, 5 May 2006 13:42:52 +0800
"Michael Richter" <ttmrichter at gmail.com> wrote:

> cd /
> <enter a string of commands here and, in the process, forget where you are>
> rm -fR * .old
> 
> What was that about "sane defaults" and "graceful error recovery" that
> someone else was blathering on about again?  There's not so much as a "are
> you sure you want to kill your system?"-style error message there.  The
> "sane default" is to trash your whole file system.  From a moment's
> inattention.

Quite true. Of course if the user concerned is using Ubuntu, and has not
enabled a root password, it becomes less likely (not impossible by any
means, just less likely).

I suppose that's one argument in favour of the sudo default as a "sane
default". At least it exits after a command, so unless you consciously
prepend "sudo", you get a permission refusal. I assume, though I don't
intend to test my theory ( heh ), that something similar to "rm -fR /
" could be done on Mac OS-X with sudo.

The same kind of typo can cetainly wipe out a user's own files...

$ pwd
/home/peter
$ rm -fR * .old
$ ls
$

Oops!

Some distros ( Mandrake used to do this) alias rm to 'rm -i' . Personally,
I don't like this, but I can see the thinking. 

Peter