Blindly Un-SHARing files (Horror Story)

[Sean Casey]

In article <1617 at wucs.UUCP> tp at 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
--
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Sean Casey                UUCP:  cbosgd!ukma!sean        CSNET:  sean at uky.csnet
University of Kentucky    ARPA:  ukma!sean at anl-mcs.arpa
Lexington, Kentucky     BITNET:  sean at ukma.bitnet