On 13/02/2015 16:31, Alan Mackenzie wrote: > Hi, Gentoo. > > I'm clearing out dross from my home directory, as me (not as root) and > I've just deleted this file: > > -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Apr 11 2011 grep > > , simply by typing $ rm grep. I was prompted with: > > rm: remove write-protected regular empty file ■grep■? > > , to which I responded 'y'. The file is now gone. > > So, as a non root user, I've managed to delete a file belonging to root, > to which I have no write access. This is crazy! I'm not happy about > this. What's going on? >
Nothing is going on, the system is working as designed and is doing it correctly. It's not the permissions of a file that apply to deletion, it's the permissions of the directory it's in. Because that's all a delete is - remove one linee from the directory index and the file goes away. It's also the exact opposite of creating the file, how does that work? Well you can't have write permissions yet on a file that has not been created, the permissions must be the directory. Same with delete. Trust me, there is no arguing with this - Unix has always worked this way and likely always will. -- Alan McKinnon alan.mckin...@gmail.com
