Nuxified GNU/Linux Help Forums - rm -rf of data on usb stick leads to crunching of harddisk: what the hell? - Comments

I should have kept the

tbuitenh — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 20:29:50 +0200

I should have kept the weird output of rm, now I have nothing remotely useful to put in the report. It's not even certain that it did indeed jump to a different place, the missing parts of secondlife might as well be caused by a bug in the package manager (arch's pacman) or yet something else. Who knows.

I think the crazy filenames in the corrupted filesystem on the stick caused a buffer overflow that made rm go delete something else, I might have a look at the sourcecode of rm sometime to see if that is possible. But not now, I'm too busy.

I agree this shouldn't

KIAaze — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 22:09:23 +0200

I agree this shouldn't happen. :/
Maybe you should file a bug report: http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/

Unfortunately there ARE

tbuitenh — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 21:24:38 +0200

Unfortunately there ARE files missing from my system now. Nothing essential, though, just most of secondlife, which I reinstalled.

If there is anything else missing I guess I'll just bump into it and reinstall whatever package got damaged.

Lesson learned: don't do rm -rf as root on a filesystem that looks damaged. This kind of thing shouldn't happen though: why on earth did rm jump from one filesystem to another?

rm -rf of data on usb stick leads to crunching of harddisk: what the hell?

tbuitenh — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 17:41:56 +0100

I tried to remove some data (some damaged files and a bootable slax, actually) from a USB stick using rm -r. That didn't work (permission denied) so I tried it again as root.