Protection from the dreaded "rm -fr /"

Giorgos Keramidas keramida at freebsd.org
Sat Oct 2 01:54:06 PDT 2004


On 2004-10-02 18:33, Edwin Groothuis <edwin at mavetju.org> wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 02, 2004 at 11:19:28AM +0300, Giorgos Keramidas wrote:
> > 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:
>
> I'm not so much worried about 'rm -rf /', but I'm more worried about
> "rm -rf *" in my home directory. It happened once because I was too
> happy switching directories before realising what I was doing in
> the wrong directory.

I can't do anything about that, I'm afraid.

> Also, refusing to do it is not the ideal way to go, I think that
> if you have two -f's specified it would do it anyway. Just my two
> cents of course.

My intuition tells me that there is practically no case where root would
really like to rm -fr the root partition.  There are other ways to clean
up a disk that are much faster and less prone to accidents.  But I can
make it behave as it does now with a double -f option.



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