On 16 Mar 2005, at 20:43, Brian Foster wrote:
> I've never understood why BSD added `-R' to chown(1),
> chmod(1), and chgrp(1) in the first place. that option,
> which I have never liked for several reasons (including
> one which should now be obvious!), did not exist in
> 7th Edition Unix. since find(1) did, the functionality
> was present, but in a form that is less dangerous.
>> rm(1) in Unix of that vintage did have `-r', and _I_
> once did the equivalent of `cd /; rm -rf *' (followed by
> a quick ^C !) --- massively fortunately, late at night
> (which is probably the reason: sleepiness!) c.30mins
> after a full level-0 backup had completed, so all that
> was lost was a few e-mails. but a long night turned
> into a very very loonnnggggg night.... ;-\
>> the `--(no-)preserve-root' is (very probably) a GNU
> invention. the historical, Unix, and maybe POSIX.2
> behaviour is GNUs `--no-preserve-root'. but no matter
> which way it is, you would still have all the other
> problems with the absurd `-R' option, including the
> sort of thing I did: `cd /; chmod -R 777 *'
The only answer to this is Neal Stephenson's classic essay about the
Hole Hawg, which you can read at http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html .
The 6th paragraph sums the matter up nicely IMO.
Niall
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