[patch] rm can have undesired side-effects
Matthew Dillon
dillon at apollo.backplane.com
Sun Nov 5 03:02:52 UTC 2006
:...
:BSD behaviour:
:- OpenBSD handles hardlinks since 3.3:
: -P Overwrite regular files before deleting them. Files
: are overwritten three times, first with the byte pattern
: 0xff, then 0x00, and then 0xff again, before they are
: deleted. Files with multiple links will not be overwritten.
:- NetBSD uses 0xff, 0x00 and then random data. Ignores link count
:- DragonFlyBSD has the same behaviour as FreeBSD
:
:...
:Although I am a big defender of "the user should know what he does",
:the "right thing to do"[TM] would probably be to sync the behaviour
:of FreeBSD's rm(1) to OpenBSD and lobby NetBSD and DragonFlyBSD to do
:the same :)
:
: Joerg
I agree. I will make this change in DragonFly right now, in fact.
The -P option really needs to be consistent across environments
and my take on the original design was so users could alias rm to
rm -P in their .cshrc files. Clearly it cannot destroy the contents
of the file in the presence of hard links when used in that context.
-Matt
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