Actually, I would like to support this motion... Thinking over the possible behaviours of -P is to sit in a room saying "to delete or not to delete..." If you think it over from a higher perspective, "The UNIX Way" (TM) is to have individual commands for specific tasks and to extract tasks from commands that have gotten too complex... and I think this is the case of rm... a "shred" command should be added that has the following behaviour:
if the file is not writable, return with error. if the file has multiple links, and option -f was not specified, return with error. overwrite the file. optionally, unlink the file. Additionally, -P should either be rm'ed from rm, or added as a backwards compatibility hack that calls "shred" and returns with error every time the latter does. These are my 1.99 cents. - Daniel ----- Original Message ---- From: Tim Clewlow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: Bakul Shah <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; Doug Barton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]; freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Sent: Monday, October 30, 2006 12:20:33 PM Subject: Re: [patch] rm can have undesired side-effects --- Bakul Shah <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Sorry if I tuned in late:-) > > I vote for taking *out* -P. It is an ill-designed > feature. > Or if you keep it, also add it to mv, cp -f & ln -f > since > these commands can also unlink a file and once > unlinked in > this matter you can't scrub it. And also fix up the > behavior > for -P when multiple links. And since mv can use > rename(2), > you will have to also dirty up the kernel interface > somehow. > Not to mention even editing such a sensitive file > can leave > stuff all over the disk that a bad guy can get at. > If you > are truely paranoid (as opposed to paranoid only > when on > meds) you know how bad that is! > > If you are that concious about scrubbing why not add > scrubbing as a mount option (suggested option: -o > paranoid) > then at least it will be handled consistently. > > What's the world come to when even the paranoid are > such > amateurs. > > -- bakul > Based on all the potential situations where a -P option may possibly be implemented, is it worthwhile considering creating a command that just scrubs a file, and does nothing else. This would seem to fit the Unix paradigm of single command to do a single thing, and may be preferable to attempting to embed this function in every command that may "possibly" remove a file. Just my 2c Tim ____________________________________________________________________________________ Low, Low, Low Rates! Check out Yahoo! Messenger's cheap PC-to-Phone call rates (http://voice.yahoo.com) _______________________________________________ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" _______________________________________________ freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org mailing list http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-hackers To unsubscribe, send any mail to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]"
