Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!lll-winken!uunet!tektronix!psueea!jove.cs.pdx.edu!kirkenda
From: kirkenda@jove.cs.pdx.edu (Steve Kirkendall)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: bug in rm -r
Message-ID: <1152@psueea.UUCP>
Date: 7 May 89 19:50:47 GMT
Sender: news@psueea.UUCP
Reply-To: kirkenda@jove.cs.pdx.edu (Steve Kirkendall)
Organization: Dept. of Computer Science, Portland State University; Portland OR
Lines: 22

A funny thing just happened to me while running Minix-ST...

I was in a directory called $HOME/work/precomm and wanted to remove a directory
called $HOME/work/hostmgr, so I did this:

	$ rm -r ../hostmgr

AND IT TRIED TO DELETE MY CURRENT DIRECTORY!  It got as far as deleting .
and .. before it got stuck & quit, so I didn't loose any data files.  But I
was left with a directory that had no . or .. entries in it, a definite no-no.

OK, so I copied my files to a different directory, did a chdir out of the
mangled precomm directory, and tried to delete the poor thing.  I couldn't.
Eventually I figured out that root could, however, so my file system is healthy
again.

But I will NEVER try to `rm -r ../anything` again.  Not under Minix-ST anyway.
(No, I have not tried to reproduce this bug, either, so I may have miss-guessed
the prime mover of this bug.)

	-- Steve Kirkendall
	   ...uunet!tektronix!psu-cs!kirkenda