I ran the following in /tmp to clean out old files:

find /tmp/. -mtime +30 -prune -type f –exec rm -f {} \;

the next thing I know, major portions of /etc are gone including
rc.d, inittab, groups, resolv.conf, etc. Needless to say it was a long night.

But I don't get it. Even if there were soft links in tmp, find
shouldn't follow them. Can anybody tell me what happened?

Thanks.

mdchachi <mdchachi@chachich.com> wrote:
> I ran the following in /tmp to clean out old files:
>
> find /tmp/. -mtime +30 -prune -type f ?exec rm -f {} \;
>
> the next thing I know, major portions of /etc are gone

I assume you mean '-' and not '?'.

The statement looks harmless enough; the -prune is a little weird, but
cannot do damage.
Not even a hard link to a directory could be the cause, as this does
not work across file systems.

Is there a chance to retrieve the statement you actually typed from
root's command history? There might have been a typo...

Yours,
Laurenz Albe

Are you sure that you do not insert a space character between "/tmp" and
"/." inadvertantly ?

or between "/tmp/" and "." ?

mdchachi wrote:
> I ran the following in /tmp to clean out old files:
>
> find /tmp/. -mtime +30 -prune -type f –exec rm -f {} \;
>
> the next thing I know, major portions of /etc are gone including
> rc.d, inittab, groups, resolv.conf, etc. Needless to say it was a long night.
>
> But I don't get it. Even if there were soft links in tmp, find
> shouldn't follow them. Can anybody tell me what happened?
>
> Thanks.

Patrick Begou wrote:
> Are you sure that you do not insert a space character between "/tmp" and
> "/." inadvertantly ?
>
> or between "/tmp/" and "." ?

...and was your cwd /etc ?

mgrd <mgrd@gmx.net> wrote in message news:<2s089nF1fnd67U1@uni-berlin.de>...
> Patrick Begou wrote:
> > Are you sure that you do not insert a space character between "/tmp" and
> > "/." inadvertantly ?
> >
> > or between "/tmp/" and "." ?
>
> ..and was your cwd /etc ?

Thanks for your replies. Actually I didn't run the command directly,
I gave it to a sys admin to run and wasn't with him at the time. So I
suppose it's possible that he inserted a space in there. It's the
only thing that makes sense...