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/

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