Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!usc!samsung!olivea!uunet!escob1!dickson
From: dickson@escob1.UUCP (Dave Dickson)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Help - we lost all our files!
Message-ID: <1347@escob1.UUCP>
Date: 28 Jun 91 16:22:11 GMT
Organization: Ohio Bell Telephone, (Eng'ng) , Columbus, OH
Lines: 34


Help!  We have been running the crontab line shown below
on various platforms for several years and have never
experienced any problems.  However, the other morning, at 03:45, we
lost every FILE (only files) on one of our systems!  Of course we
did not loose any of the daemons resident in memory; and we did
not loose: sh, find, xargs and rm!  Before we restored anything
we determined that the last access times on: sh, find, xargs and
rm was 03:45:00 - making it highly suspicious that the problem stems
from the crontab entry.

Now, sometime back I remember a long-going discussion concerning
bugs with the xargs command.  I really didn't follow it, but I
seem to remember problems with the parsing of the input etc.
A point of interest is that none of the directories were removed;
however, it is my theory that this is simply because one of the first
commands to be removed was rmdir, which was needed to remove the
directories.

We are reasonably certain that this was not an intruder or other
nefarious critter, as we have a reasonably secure system (I, know,
famous last words).

Anyway, any help or suggestions as to the cause of this would be
appreciated.

CRONTAB ENTRY:
45 3 * * * find /tmp/* /usr/tmp/* -mtime +1 -print | xargs rm -r

Thank you, in advance.
-- 
David G. Dickson
Ohio Bell Telephone Co. (614-223-8134)
uunet!escob1!dickson