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A warning on a new destructive 'trojan horse'
Authored by: Graff on May 12, '04 07:25:34PM

> won't you still have to enter a Admin password for this command to run

Nope, not if you are only deleting stuff in your own home directory. You have write permission on all of your own stuff and so that means you have permission to delete it. No password is needed when you are dealing with stuff you have write permission for.

Now, if you wanted to delete the actual system files and not just the stuff in your home directory then you would need to enter in an administrator password.

Even if they changed the rm command so that it needed permission a malicious program could still just write random data to a file to mess it up. The only way to stop that for sure is to ask you for every single file (documents, downloaded stuff, music, preferences, etc) that gets changed. Think about it, would you want to have to enter a password every single time you changed a file? Remember that almost every program writes to a preference file at least once while it is running. What a headache that would be!



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