On 11 Jun 2013 02:19, "Mike Frysinger" <vap...@gentoo.org> wrote: > > On Monday 10 June 2013 18:20:44 Chris F.A. Johnson wrote: > > On Mon, 10 Jun 2013, Linda Walsh wrote: > > >> Point taken, but the only way such a string would be passed as a > > >> variable name is if it was given as user input -- which would, > > >> presumably, be sanitized before being used. Programming it literally > > >> makes as much sense as 'rm -rf /'. > > > > > > --- > > > > > > That still didn't POSIX-Gnu rm from disabling that ability. > > > > Did they? I'm not going to test it :( > > do it as non-root: > $ rm -rf / > rm: it is dangerous to operate recursively on `/' > rm: use --no-preserve-root to override this failsafe > -mike
If that check didn't exist, rm -rf / would still be dangerous; it would just give a lot of errors for the files it couldn't delete, and delete the ones it can. Running it as a normal user doesn't make it safer.
