rm(1) bug, possibly serious

[Nicolas Rachinsky]

* Oliver Fromme <olli at lurza.secnetix.de> [2007-09-25 19:43 +0200]:
> By the way, an additional confusion is that ".." and "../"
> are handled differently.  Specifying ".." always leads to
> this message:
> 
> rm: "." and ".." may not be removed
> 
> and nothing is actually removed.  It is confusing that
> adding a slash leads to a different error message _and_
> removal of the contents of the parent directory.  Clearly
> a POLA violation.

Adding a slash often leads to different behaviour.

nicolas at pc5 ~/rd> mkdir foo; ln -s foo bar
nicolas at pc5 ~/rd> rm -r bar
nicolas at pc5 ~/rd> ls -l
total 2
drwxr-xr-x  2 nicolas  wheel  512 Sep 25 20:55 foo/
nicolas at pc5 ~/rd> 

nicolas at pc5 ~/rd> mkdir foo; ln -s foo bar
nicolas at pc5 ~/rd> rm -r bar/
nicolas at pc5 ~/rd> ls -l
total 0
lrwxr-xr-x  1 nicolas  wheel  3 Sep 25 20:56 bar@ -> foo
nicolas at pc5 ~/rd> 

And cp -R behaves differently for dir and dir/, too, but it is
explicitly documented there.

Nicolas

-- 
http://www.rachinsky.de/nicolas