u/lukmly013 💾 (lemmy.sdf.org)/etc? Never heard of her.
partial_accumenReusing names of critical system directories in subdirectories in your home dir.
I agree with this take, don’t wanna blame the victim but there’s a lesson to be learned.
neatcheeexcept if you read the accompanying text they already started the issue by accidentally unpacking an archive to their user directory that was intended for the root directory. that’s how they got an etc dir in their user directory in the first place
Could make one archive intended to be unpacked from /etc/ and one archive that’s intended to be unpacked from /home/Alice/ , that way they wouldn’t need to be root for the user bit, and there would never be an etc directory to delete. And if they run tar test (t) and pwd first, they could check the intended actions were correct before running the full tar. Some tools can be dangerous, so the user should be aware, and have safety measures.
I understand that they were intending to unpack from / and they unpacked from /home/ instead. I’m just arguing that the unpack was already a potentially dangerous action, especially if it had the potential to overwrite any system file on the drive. For this reason it would make sense to have some way of checking it was correct before running it.
I’m suggesting 3 things:
- Confirm the contents of the tar
- Confirm where you want to extract the contents
- Have backups in case this goes wrong somehow
Check the contents:
- use "tar t’’ to print the contents before extracting, read the output and check you are happy with it
Confirm where:
- run pwd first, or specify “-C ‘/output-place/’” during extraction, to prevent output to the wrong folder
Have backups:
- Assume this potentially dangerous process of extracting to /etc may break some critical files there, so make sure this directory is properly backed up first, and check these backups are current.
I’m not suggesting that everyone knows they should do this. But I’m saying that it’s only avoidable by being extra careful. And with experience people build a knowledge of what may be dangerous and how to prevent that danger.