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Message-ID: <87vfvj6abn.fsf@cain.internet2.edu> Date: 06 Jun 2003 01:31:40 -0400 From: stanislav shalunov <shalunov@...ernet2.edu> To: Solar Designer <solar@...nwall.com>, owl-users@...ts.openwall.com Subject: Re: stmpclean problem Ihsan, While stmpclean is not supposed to be used to clean up directories other than publicly writable temporary stores (/tmp, /var/tmp, and such), there's no excuse for what it did to your filesystem. There's no way you could have foreseen such drastic action as interpreting `./' as `/' and then going around your whole system looking for things to delete. This was an unforseen consequence of an action that seemed to make sense; I simply haven't considered the case of relative pathnames---obviously. I am sorry about this. All, I will make modifications that should prevent such harmless usage mistake from becoming a disaster again. There doesn't appear to be any significant drawback to not allowing relative pathnames, so I'll check for `/' as the first character of the directory name as given on the command line. I'm also considering checking permissions and making sure it's 1777 and refusing to run otherwise to minimize the chances of people using the utility in unintended ways. (In a non-publicly-writable directory, `find | xargs rm' is safe.) Opinions about the permissions check? -- Stanislav Shalunov http://www.internet2.edu/~shalunov/ This message is designed to be viewed in boustrophedon.
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