Re: chown and bash trashed part of system

[Vincent Chapman]

I understand, but there are still incosistancies in the unix world of
shells.  Try this and you'll understand how one(I) could make this
mistake.

$ sudo bash echo .*
. .. .hidden_files

in zsh 

$ sudo zsh echo .*
.hidden_files

zsh would not have accended into the parent directories.  Bash will.

One would not stop to think that one shell would handle something so
simple as .* differently from other shells.  I know assume spells... but
thats what happened.


Regards,

Vincent


On Wed, 2008-12-31 at 00:28 -0700, Bob Proulx wrote:
> Vincent Chapman wrote:
> > $ sudo chown -R vincent:vincent * 
> 
> When using -R and other commands in recursive mode you generally don't
> want to use '*'.  Simply use '.' in that case.
> 
>   sudo chown -R vincent:vincent .
> 
> The command will recurse down '.' directory and do what you wanted.
> That would have included all files hidden and otherwise.
> 
> Personally I prefer find in this case.
> 
>   find . -exec chown vincent:vincent {} +
> 
> > changed all but the hidden folders, so did not work for this situation
> > $ sudo chown -R vincent:vincent .*  
> > Command very bad.  
> > ...
> > Luckily I only messed up three user home directories.  Should there be a
> > filter for '..' that prohibts chown from assending towards / ?
> 
> Have you ever used a kitchen knife?  I can't imagine a kitchen without
> one.  Have you ever cut yourself while using a kitchen knife?  We all
> have at one time or another.  The classic thought experiment (IIRC by
> Andrew Koenig) is to design a kitchen knife that will make it
> impossible to hurt yourself while using it.  After having thought
> about the problem and created a design the follow-up question is,
> would you use such a knife in the kitchen yourself?
> 
> This is a useful thought experiment that always comes to my mind when
> people try to make it impossible to do bad things because that also
> tends to restrict people from doing good things too.
> 
> Bob
> 
> 
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