Protection from the dreaded "rm -fr /"

[Michael Reifenberger]

On Sat, 2 Oct 2004, David Schultz wrote:

> Date: Sat, 2 Oct 2004 16:12:11 -0400
> From: David Schultz <das at FreeBSD.ORG>
> To: Michael Reifenberger <mike at Reifenberger.com>
> Cc: freebsd-hackers at FreeBSD.ORG
> Subject: Re: Protection from the dreaded "rm -fr /"
> 
> On Sat, Oct 02, 2004, Michael Reifenberger wrote:
>> On Sat, 2 Oct 2004, David Schultz wrote:
>> ...
>>> 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.
>>>
>>
>> Every anti foot shooting takes time to check for.
>> A strncmp for every arg is maybe ok. Traversing the tree for realpath is
>> not.
>> The job for `rm` is to remove whatever it is given to get removed.
>> As fast as possible. Nothing else.
>
> Sigh.  The original patch that just used strcmp() wouldn't have
> increased the time to execute rm by more than a few hundred
> nanoseconds.
>

Wasn't there a discussion recently to increase ARG_MAX...?
:-)


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