Re: Running "chmod o-rx .*" in /root/ dir "FreeBSD"

[Bob Proulx]

> This messages appeared at address@hidden
> 
> Maybe a special prompt should be produced to stop the problem described
> below. The leading "." has got mixed with 2 different meanings:
>   * hidden files start with "."
>   * the directory above is ".."

And also the current directory, '.'.

> Thinking of pattern matching could lead to the current behaviour. It
> may be better to change it.

I think you are confused.  You have submitted a report, possibly about
a bug but I fail to find one in your report, to bug-fileutils which is
a mailing list dedicated to the GNU fileutils package.  But you seem
to be talking about shell wildcard expansion which is not done by
fileutils but by your shell, probably /bin/sh, /bin/bash, /bin/ksh,
/bin/csh, /bin/tcsh, /bin/zsh, or possibly even a different shell as
there are many to choose from.  But you did not say which shell you
were referring too.  However, all of those do filename wildcard
expansion so that is probably not important.  Perhaps you meant to
complain to one of the command line shell folks listed above?

Nothing in any of the GNU core utilities of fileutils, sh-utils,
textutils does filename expansion.  That job is left to the command
line shell.  The utilities have no power to control filename
expansion.

[Note that it is possible to turn off filename globbing.  In bash that
would be using 'set -f' and no more wildcard expansion will be
performed.  But you will find that none of the normal unix commands
work in that mode and that you would need to create an entire new set
of commands which did their own wildcard expansion (as in DOS) in
order to make that even moderately useable.  And then of course it
wouldn't be a unix-like operating system.

As a lark I decided if that could be made usable.  Hmm...  To chmod
only the dot files without . or .. getting changed.  You have to do
your own wild card expansion using $() on the command line.  Assuming
using bash the following works, after a fashion.

  set -f
  ls -d $(\ls -A | grep '^\.')
  chmod go-w $(\ls -A | grep '^\.')

The ls -A does not list . or .. and so nothing special needs to be
done there.  Use \ls to avoid any aliases for ls.  Now the grep should
only leave normal files left over that begin with a dot.  Of course
you notice that in order to ls those files you have to use ls to
generate the list to be sent to ls!

Note that I am not really suggesting this.  It is just a diversion.]

Bob


Part of an upcoming FAQ on this topic, and a mostly canned response:

The shell interpreter is expanding the command line glob characters
prior to handing the arguments off to your command.  This is a simple
form of regular expression matching designed to make file name
matching easier.  This provides a consistent interface to all programs
since the expansion code is common to all programs by being in the
interpreting shell instead of in the program itself.  Commands in UNIX
do not see the '.*' or any of the shell metacharacters.  Commands see
the expanded out names which the shell found matched file names in
current directory.

The '*' is the "glob" character because it matches a glob of
characters.  But it only matches files in the current directory.  It
does not go out and list files in other directories.  The shell
matches and expands glob characters and hands of the resulting
information to the command.

You can double check this by using the echo command.  This is built
into most command shells, for example into bash.  Try echo .*.  In
your example the first would print out .* if nothing matched but would
print out all file names that did match.  The command would see the
result and has no idea that you provided a wild card to match against
file names.


> At 2001.October.28 12:17 -0500 Sunday, Philip Mak <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
>    Subject was: (Re: Stupid, stupid
> 
>  >I just did a stupid thing to lock myself out of one of my boxes that I
>  >only have remote ssh access to. I thought I'd share it with you guys so
>  >that no one else makes the same mistake.
>  >
>  >Never type "chmod o-rx .*" when logged in as root, inside root's home
>  >directory (/root). That will affect .. as well, meaning that the directory
>  >"/" will no longer be accessible to normal users.
>  >
>  >Now I can't ssh into my box (any attempt to connect will say "Cannot find
>  >root directory" and kick me out) to fix this, so I have to wait for the
>  >guy who has physical access to the box to fix it.
>  >
>  >
>  >To Unsubscribe: send mail to address@hidden
>  >with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
> 
> E-mail: Craig Carey <address@hidden>