Re: Directory name problem...

Gerard Roudier (groudier@club-internet.fr)
Sun, 25 Oct 1998 18:33:46 +0100 (MET)


On Sun, 25 Oct 1998, Joe wrote:

> Riley,
> I admin a machine, and do the same thing to wipe out cores every
> day. However, all i use is the following line in my root crontab:
>
> 0 6 * * * find / -name core -exec rm {} ';'

He Joe!

You are very fortunate not to admin a machine on which I am working.
Any system administrator who intentionnaly delete one of my files runs the
risk of having his nose slightly punched, unless it looks like Mr
Scharzenheger (modulo mispellings). :-)

> Since this only wipes files, not directories, this leaves all my kernel
> stuff ok. every morning, my cron daemon sends me an e-mail that it
> couldn't wipe out 3 or 4 files with the name "core" in them, because they
> are in fact directories, and rm doesn't work. You may want to speak to
> your sys-admin and see if this would be a viable option. Good luck.

In my opinion, the only way to speak to such a sys-admin is to punch.

> On Sun, 25 Oct 1998, Riley Williams wrote:
>
> > Hi there.
> >
> > I know this will sound daft, and to an extent, I feel daft for asking
> > it, but it's one problem that I could do without...
> >
> > The system administrator of the main system I use recently installed a
> > script which automagically deletes all directory entries named 'core'
> > every time it's run, which looks like hourly.

If your system administrator is not able to understand the difference
between 'rm' and 'rm -rf', then he is a very dangerous system
administrator. But if he really wants to delete user directories based on
directory names then he deserve to be punched, in my opinion.

> > At face value, this looks like an eminently reasonable thing to do,
> > and it would be apart from one slight problem, which is that it
> > prevents the Linux kernel sources from compiling...

It is not reasonnable, in my opinion, to delete any user file without
having previously backed it up. The name of a file is not a 1 to 1
relationship to its content. Such house-keeping must be 100% sure and if
it is only based on file name it cannot be so.

> > Unfortunately, the Linux kernel source tree includes a directory named
> > core - check for yourself, it's in directory net under wherever you've
> > stored the kernel from - and one side effect of the said script is
> > that every time it's run, the said directory and everything in it gets
> > wiped...

The directory name 'core' hasn't be a good choice since it was known that
some stupid system administrators use to blindly delete files of some
specific names, but this name is quite legal and quite fine.

The thing to change is likely not the 'net/core' Linux sub-directory name.

Regards,
Gerard.

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