On 11/07/2014 01:57 AM, John Andersen wrote:
- -- Explain again the part about rm -rf /
Just saw this in the signature. Actually this is not as scary as one might expect. (The braver ones among you may already have tried it in a snapshotted VM.) POSIX mandates to skip operands that resolve to the root directory (as well as to "." and ".."). [0] If either [...] or if an operand resolves to the root directory, rm shall write a diagnostic message to standard error and do nothing more with such operands. For whatever reason, GNU rm(1) provides the --no-preserve-root option which would suppress this safety. DON'T USE IT!! The GNU coreutils package even has a test case for this - verifying that both the POSIX mandated behavior and that of the above option (would) work as specified. [1] [0] http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/rm.html [1] http://git.sv.gnu.org/cgit/coreutils.git/tree/tests/rm/r-root.sh Have fun, Berny -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org