[Gllug] Is this funny

[Ian Northeast]

Vincent AE Scott wrote:
> 
> Simon Trimmer(simon at urbanmyth.org)@Wed, Jan 02, 2002 at 11:34:59AM +0000:
> > On 1 Jan 2002, Nix wrote:
> > > This whole house of cards fell completely to pieces when other
> > > filesystems started to be supported, because the knowledge of the format
> > > of a directory was wired into lots of userspace programs :( many Unixes
> > > (such as Linux) even ban read(2)ing from a directory, on the basis that
> > > even if write(2)ing to a directory is banned, if you're allowed to
> > > read(2) from it someone will find a way to rely on that :(
> >
> > It's a bit of a bugger though, I have been in situations (years ago) where
> > people have typed a rm -rf * in the wrong place and taken out useful things
> > like /bin, so you have a live system that is practically useless. Without ls
> > it's nice to be able to cat . :)
> >
> 
> i was sat next to someone once, doing support, who'd noticed that
> someone had added a root2 act to his solaris box.  he then preceeded to
> use the lovely gui admintool to remove the user.  and the home diretory.
> he turned to me and said 'what does it mean by command ls not found?'
> with his disk going apeshit in the background.  laugh? i almost sh**
> myself. ;-)

At least *that* one won't happen with systems which don't default root's
$HOME to "/". Which means most Linux distros, BSD etc. It beats me why
the commercial Unix vendors still do it. On AIX I change it, it has
other drawbacks such as / filling with junk which you dare not delete
"just in case".

This reminds me - must change it on my Solaris system:) Still, it's only
a toy.

Regards, Ian

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