[TUHS] There is turmoil in Linux-land - When did rm first avoid going upwards?

Ron Natalie ron at ronnatalie.com
Tue Apr 25 10:06:28 AEST 2017



> rm in V6 outsources globbing to /etc/glob, which appears to report
> no-match if the first character is .

Actually, it's the shell that calls glob.   Glob then invokes the command
(in this case rm).

Anyhow, that doesn't do what you think it does.    It ignores directory
entries that begin with '.' if the search string doesn't begin with ..

".*"  will indeed match ".."

Of course, the calamity depends on whether you have /tmp on it's own
filesystem.   V6 didn't go .. off the top of the filesystem, the root ..
just linked back to the inode 1 (the root itself).





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