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Steam For Linux Bug Wipes Out All of a User's Files
An anonymous reader sends a report of a bug in Steam's Linux client that will accidentally wipe all of a user's files if they move their Steam folder. According to the bug report:
I launched steam. It did not launch, it offered to let me browse, and still could not find it when I pointed to the new location. Steam crashed. I restarted it. It re-installed itself and everything looked great. Until I looked and saw that steam had apparently deleted everything owned by my user recursively from the root directory. Including my 3tb external drive I back everything up to that was mounted under /media.
Another user reported a similar problem — losing his home directory — and problems with the script were found: at some point, the Steam script sets $STEAMROOT as the directory containing all Steam's data, then runs rm -rf "$STEAMROOT/"* later on. If Steam has been moved, $STEAMROOT returns as empty, resulting in rm -rf "/"* which causes the unexpected deletion.
I can hear the Steam dev. shop manager:
Carl! Put the bullhorn down! Dave! Quit staring at Lucy and get back to wark! Kevin! We have to ship this code in TWO DAYS! Jerry! Don't point that over here!
Screw over people on Windows with micro-transactions and useless updates, screw over people on Mac with games that run poorly, screw over people on Linux by wiping files. It's like, the less popular your OS of choice, the more shafting you get.
Attention user, Steam has detected unusual activity on your part that could be construed as part of an effort to hack Steam. Therefore, Steam has deployed the Doomsday Device on your machine. You now have 5 minutes to either comply with out request to restore Steam to its original folder or to send a bionic person to shut down the Doomsday Device at the source. Otherwise, your system will be wiped and FBI agents will be arriving at your home shortly. Please keep your hands in the yellow circles pending their arrival. And thank you for using Steam!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
They need to have system administrators working for them, apparently. Not using that command is so ingrained, that I have the nightmare where I type "rm -rf /" in a console instead of the dream where you are naked in front of the class, or the one where you didn't study for finals.
I also have the one where I run the endless loop of opening more and more xterms until my SPARCstation falls over.
Is why you have backups. You need to apply the rule Total Backups = Total Backups -1
so if you have 1 you have 0.
So...apparently I have -1 backups, does this mean I owe the universe a backup?
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
rm -rf .*
The key fact is that .. matches .*
GAME OVER
Has anyone actually gone into root and executed the command-that-shall-not-be-named? It's like being in a slow-motion train-wreck. I'd like to say I did it once just to see what would happen, but that would be a lie. I was a fresh-faced admin on a Solaris workstation with root access cleaning up the hard drive of extraneous data. Imagine the scene: the finger comes down in slow motion, the Enter key depresses and a few microseconds after, everything speeds up to real time as the brain realizes what just happened. That little bit of skin between your legs crushes up and you feel like your guts are falling out of your body. You rapidly try to find the process and kill it before those very commands get wiped, but it's too late....
And yet some people still cling on to shell scripts for their boot system.
yo dawg, I heard you liked linux, so we are putting linux in yo linux!....
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Or you have underflowed, and have 4,294,967,295 backups.