Re: rm(1) bug, possibly serious

Nicolas Rachinsky wrote:
Oliver Fromme wrote:
By the way, an additional confusion is that ".." and "../"
are handled differently. Specifying ".." always leads to
this message:

rm: "." and ".." may not be removed

and nothing is actually removed. It is confusing that
adding a slash leads to a different error message _and_
removal of the contents of the parent directory. Clearly
a POLA violation.

Adding a slash often leads to different behaviour.

Yes, I'm aware of that. I often make use of the feature
that "find /sys/" expands the symlink, while "find /sys"
does not. The same holds true for ls(1).

However, I would still argue that there is no sane reason
for "rm -rf ../" behaving differently from "rm -rf ..",
especially because it behaves differently in a destructive
way. That's why I call it a POLA violation.

Best regards
Oliver

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