X-Spam-Check-By: sourceware.org Date: Mon, 1 May 2006 17:27:16 -0400 (EDT) From: Igor Peshansky Reply-To: cygwin@cygwin.com To: cygwin@cygwin.com Subject: Re: "rm -rf ./foo/" safe to use? In-Reply-To: <200604261436.k3QEa3AB022090@tigris.pounder.sol.net> Message-ID: References: <200604261436.k3QEa3AB022090@tigris.pounder.sol.net> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Mailing-List: contact cygwin-help@cygwin.com; run by ezmlm Precedence: bulk List-Unsubscribe: List-Subscribe: List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: , Sender: cygwin-owner@cygwin.com Mail-Followup-To: cygwin@cygwin.com Delivered-To: mailing list cygwin@cygwin.com On Wed, 26 Apr 2006, Tom Rodman wrote: > Rightly or wrongly over the years I've refrained from using > cygwin to delete large directories; instead, from bash I'll cd > to the parent dir, and run: > > cmd /c rmdir /s /q MYDIR2DELETE > > I think I had read something years back about cygwin's inode > simulation (sorry to munge up the terminology), being imperfect; > so that may have convinced me to not use "rm -rf DIRXXX". > > So is "rm -rf ./foo/" safe to use? Is there any danger that > anything other than ./foo/ will be deleted? > > Thanks for any help, I'm mainly just curious. :-> IIRC, there was one situation in which "rm -rf" ended up removing something other than the specified directory: if there were a mount that was stale (i.e., pointed to something no longer present), and you tried to remove the mount point directory, rm would happily start removing the root. However, I haven't tried this after the change that made mount points appear in readdir(), so this may no longer be the case. For those brave enough to try it: cd / mkdir BLAH mount c:\NonExistentDir /BLAH rm -rf /BLAH I'd be really interested in knowing whether this is still a problem. Disclaimer -- this used to remove the whole c:\cygwin subtree. You have been warned. Igor -- http://cs.nyu.edu/~pechtcha/ |\ _,,,---,,_ pechtcha@cs.nyu.edu | igor@watson.ibm.com ZZZzz /,`.-'`' -. ;-;;,_ Igor Peshansky, Ph.D. (name changed!) |,4- ) )-,_. ,\ ( `'-' old name: Igor Pechtchanski '---''(_/--' `-'\_) fL a.k.a JaguaR-R-R-r-r-r-.-.-. Meow! "Las! je suis sot... -Mais non, tu ne l'es pas, puisque tu t'en rends compte." "But no -- you are no fool; you call yourself a fool, there's proof enough in that!" -- Rostand, "Cyrano de Bergerac" -- Unsubscribe info: http://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple Problem reports: http://cygwin.com/problems.html Documentation: http://cygwin.com/docs.html FAQ: http://cygwin.com/faq/