Worm/Passwords
Richard A. O'Keefe
ok at quintus.uucp
Sun Nov 13 19:06:31 AEST 1988
In article <125 at embossed.UUCP> ron at embossed.UUCP (Ron Elliott) writes:
> 4) Many of you talk about the thousands of hours lost due to
> the Morris Worm. How about something like "rm *" ? How many
> hours have been lost over the last 15 years over that
> bug-feature.? Yes, I know the workarounds, and have installed
> them. How come though Un*x venders still havn't issued fixed
> rm's or even discuss the matter in their documentation? Or
> even supplied the workarounds in their distribution?
You usually know when rm * happens, and if your site has a competent
administrator you can recover your state as of the previous day. An
rm mistake doesn't erode the trust in a world-wide community!
Now, how _do_ you fix "rm *"? Suppose you restrict rm to delete exactly
one file. Watch:
foreach F (* .o)
rm $F
end
OOPS! Major bug in foreach! Better fix that.
for F in * .o
do rm $F
done
OOPS! Major bug in for! Better fix that.
echo * .o | xargs -l1 rm
OOPS! Major bugs in echo and xargs! Better fix them.
Moral: you can't change _one_ thing.
PS: I first heard about "rm *" in the Unix V7 documentation...
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