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From: Planet Debian
Subject: Francois Marier -- Preventing accidental deletion of important files using safe-rm
To: ticker-planetdebian[bei]lists.infodrom[punkt]org
Date: Sat, 1 Nov 2008 00:56:55 +0100 (CET)

http://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/2008/06/preventing-accidental-deletion-of.html

Francois Marier -- Preventing accidental deletion of important
files using safe-rm

Some weeks ago, I accidentally deleted half of my /usr/lib. I
didn't lose anything important and was able to restore everything
(thanks to my Ctrl+C'ing the process in time) but that user error
did strike me as too easy to make (apparently, I'm not alone[1]).
So I started thinking about how I could prevent something like
that from happening again.

I realized one thing: there is no way I would ever want to delete
»/usr« or »/etc« for example. I figured that "rm" should, by
default, refuse to delete certain critical directories (or files).
Of course, that would be a very controversial patch to "rm" itself
and the chances of this approach succeeding were pretty close to
zero.

So instead, I decided to build a wrapper around "rm" which
prevents the deletion of important files by checking each one
against a blacklist. Anything you add to the blacklist will not be
deletable using "rm" unless you override this protection by
calling "rm.real" directly.

Image[2]

This tool, safe-rm[3], ships with a default system-wide
configuration file (»/etc/safe-rm.conf«), but each user can
supplement that list of "protected" directories and files by
adding lines to »~/.safe-rm«.

Debian[4] and Ubuntu[5] packages are available from the usual
places.

There are of course different approaches[6] to preventing these
kinds of problems...

11:42pm[7] by François (noreply[bei]blogger[punkt]com)

Links:
1. http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/serendipity/index.php?/archives/118-Another-sorry-tale-of-woe.html
2. http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_kmDRplXH_Ys/SM5UT5yM12I/AAAAAAAAABc/ZV6fee5r4Kw/s1600-h/safe-rm.png
3. http://www.safe-rm.org.nz
4. http://packages.debian.org/safe-rm
5. http://packages.ubuntu.com/safe-rm
6. http://gitorious.org/projects/safe-rm/repos/mainline/blobs/master/README
7. http://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/2008/06/preventing-accidental-deletion-of.html

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