sean@ukma.UUCP (Sean Casey) (04/26/86)
In article <1617@wucs.UUCP> tp@wucs.UUCP (tom patterson) writes: > > I've been waiting for someone else to say this... > > naughtiness in shar files is only the tip of the iceberg. The program >contained in the shar may do bad things... the makefile that builds the >program may do bad things... Very true. In my more foolish days (I'm still foolish, just more experiened), I was making a program from uid root. The program was from a reputable source, and I had checked it over, so I wasn't very worried about trojan horses. There was a bad mistake in the makefile, however, that instead of moving a file from /usr/lib, it moved /usr/lib into a file! The really bad part comes when I get distracted right about then and don't realize this had happened. About 15 minutes later (I was the only one on then, and not near the console), I notice the dissapearance. The first thing I think of is "file system corruption". For sure. So I take the thing down and run fsck, which DID find corruption, but not because of the /usr/lib disapearance. So I'm thinking, somehow it got deleted. I try restoring it from backup, but that fills up the file system. Now I'm starting to panic. Finally, while I was looking around, I "pushd +1"d to the directory I was working in by mistake, and did an "ls". There's this directory with the name of the object file. Hmmm. I look into it. Aha! Delete backed up /usr/lib, do a "cp -r" and everything's normal, except that I've lost about 10 pounds. Moral of the story: Regardless of anything else, read the makefile. Sean -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Sean Casey UUCP: cbosgd!ukma!sean CSNET: sean@uky.csnet University of Kentucky ARPA: ukma!sean@anl-mcs.arpa Lexington, Kentucky BITNET: sean@ukma.bitnet