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Suggesion: rm: --preserve-root should be even more paranoid


From: Andrey Maykov
Subject: Suggesion: rm: --preserve-root should be even more paranoid
Date: Wed, 1 Dec 2021 01:42:54 +0600

Hello. Someone just recently made a post on reddit(
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/r542lz/) about adding an accidental
space in a path to the command line and running `rm -rf XXX /*/*`. Before
that, the bumble bee install script did `rm -rf /usr` by accident(
https://github.com/MrMEEE/bumblebee-Old-and-abbandoned/issues/123) and I
also made the same mistake at some point while learning linux.

Maybe rm should have either a new mode for everyday use, like
--preserve-root=paranoid or even be paranoid in the default mode
preserve-root=all:

I suggest that before deleting any file rm should quickly check if path
names seem suspicious, and if so, then stop completely. Suspicious can be
defined as "a path matches /XXX, i.e. a path starts with / and it's the
only forward slash in the path" and  "a path matches /usr/XXX, i.e. it
starts with /usr/ and has no more forward slashes'': people rarely intend
to nuke /bin, /dev, /etc, /usr or /usr/bin, so catching it seems very
useful if you/package maintainer makes a typo and it's only slightly
annoying for people who actually need to break the file system.

As of right now, the default option --preserve-root=all, while preventing
`rm /`,  doesn't prevent accidental `rm /*`


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