iTunes 2.0 Installer Deletes Hard Drives

Cheviot writes: "It seems Apple's new iTunes 2 installer deletes the contents of users' hard drives if the drives have been partitioned. I personally lost more than 100gb of data. More information is available at Apples Discussions board. (registration required). Apple has pulled the installer, but for hundreds, if not thousands, the damage is already done." The iTunes download page has a nice warning about the problem. Ouch.

Comments

The bug

[hysterion]

Summarizing discussions on MacNN and the Apple Forum:

The problem appears to be in two portions of the installer script which could translate into rm -rf /your_drive, if certain paths $1 or $2 contain spaces:

#!/bin/sh

# if current iTunes pkg exists, delete it b/c of Installer bug
if [ -e $1Library/Receipts/iTunes.pkg ] ; then
rm -rf $1Library/Receipts/iTunes.pkg 2> /dev/null
fi

# if iTunes application currently exists, delete it
if [ -e $2Applications/iTunes.app ] ; then
rm -rf $2Applications/iTunes.app 2> /dev/null
fi

Though when I looked, nobody seemed to have found where exactly $1 and $2 are defined; also it might be that disaster only strikes with localized versions of the OS.