Future and impact of ongoing projects in Linux world

Ralf Mardorf ralf.mardorf at alice-dsl.net
Wed Oct 12 18:09:41 UTC 2016


If a user needs special privileges to do something, then only grant the
user the required privileges, no need to give admin privileges.

If root does something, root can remount read only, set the immutable bit
temporarily, but most important, even the admin should only become root,
if required and then be very careful

rmdir does only delete empty directories

unlink is as risky as rm, but it's good practise to be aware what you
want to delete, so at least the awareness adds security, even while it
could delete files, too

mv -i and cp -i don't overwrite by accident, e.g. related to a typo
Regarding typos an advice does follow

btw. within a FS mv is an atomic operation, knowing this could be
useful to make work more safe, too

[root at moonstudio tmp]# ls -l very_important/
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Oct 12 19:18 very_important
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Oct 12 19:18 very_important1
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Oct 12 19:18 very_important2
[root at moonstudio tmp]# ls -l very_important/very_important{1,2}
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Oct 12 19:18 very_important/very_important1
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Oct 12 19:18 very_important/very_important2

before you rm, make a dry-run with ls. Oops, I don't want to delete the
above, this is what I want to delete:

[root at moonstudio tmp]# ls -l very_important/very_important{,2}
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Oct 12 19:18 very_important/very_important
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Oct 12 19:18 very_important/very_important2

Now replace  ls -l  by  rm

[root at moonstudio tmp]# ^ls -l^rm
rm very_important/very_important{,2}
[root at moonstudio tmp]# ls -l very_important/
total 0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 Oct 12 19:18 very_important1

Use the tab key, don't type, to avoid that

  rm very_important/very_important1

by accident does read

  rm very_important/ very_important1

FWIW if a developer has got a user question or does notice a bug, even a
developer is well-advised to use the appropriate forum.

How do you expect the bugs and missing features to be fixed, resp. added,
if you don't report it? If you notice it, it's up to you, to report it.

To some extend Ubuntu maintainers could patch provided software, but at some
point it's up to upstream to do the work.

You should become aware that you only waste your own time. Most subscribers
do not read, at least not reply to this thread, those who do reply and try
to explain you your mistakes only do it, when they have the time to do so and
we don't do it to argue. We are not emotional involved, we only try to make
clear, that you are on the wrong track.

Hth,
Ralf




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