Re: currently doable? Indirect notation used w/a hash

[Chris Down]

On 11 Jun 2013 02:19, "Mike Frysinger" <vapier@gentoo.org> wrote:
>
> On Monday 10 June 2013 18:20:44 Chris F.A. Johnson wrote:
> > On Mon, 10 Jun 2013, Linda Walsh wrote:
> > >>   Point taken, but the only way such a string would be passed as a
> > >>   variable name is if it was given as user input -- which would,
> > >>   presumably, be sanitized before being used. Programming it
literally
> > >>   makes as much sense as 'rm -rf /'.
> > >
> > > ---
> > >
> > >     That still didn't POSIX-Gnu rm from disabling that ability.
> >
> >     Did they? I'm not going to test it :(
>
> do it as non-root:
> $ rm -rf /
> rm: it is dangerous to operate recursively on `/'
> rm: use --no-preserve-root to override this failsafe
> -mike

If that check didn't exist, rm -rf / would still be dangerous; it would
just give a lot of errors for the files it couldn't delete, and delete the
ones it can. Running it as a normal user doesn't make it safer.