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A warning on a new destructive 'trojan horse'
Authored by: TomP on May 12, '04 03:14:05PM

When you delete a file using 'rm', you are not directly deleting the file - you are only removing a hard link to the file from directory it's in. So, you don't need write access to a file to delete it - you just need write access to the directory where that hard link lives. When no more hard links exist for a file, then the kernel deletes it automatically. (That could probably be expressed more clearly...)

Anyway, "rm -rf <path>" doesn't stop if it finds something you don't have permission to delete - it just goes ahead and deletes everything it can.



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