UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

Hi, My account is : abcd
I belong to a group: pqrs

Some thing straneg happened yesterday.
My .cshrc and .login got overwritten into pqrs's .cshrc and .login

I obviously did not explicitly overwrite pqrs's .cshrc.

Are there any reasons how this could have happened indirectly due to certain UNIX commands ??

Thx
--gjthomas

A group does not get a .cshrc and .login. What directory were these files in? Your home directory perhaps?

pqrs is a seperate account. (not a group)

.login and .cshrc were in my home directory and pqrs had its own .cshrc and .login.

strangely mine got copied into pqrs's home directory

Whoever owns those files is the person who copied them.

You can copy files for example, by using an editor incorrectly, or misusing the mv statement. It's not hard to inadvertantly overwrite a file.

Plus, it sounds like protections aren't what the should be.
If you and pqrs are in the same group, protections on pqrs' home directory need to be changed. If you aren't in the same group, it means his home directory (or yours) is open to the world. Probably not cool.

If you need to share files, use /tmp - or create a standard exchange subdirectory for each user - that has group read/write permissions so everyone can copy & read files in the directory.

There is no real audit trail for file activity. The only thing you can do is to stop it from happening again.

Hi --

u said use /tmp ... This may be a reason !

I recently added setenv TMPDIR = /tmp to .cshrc for pqrs's account.... Is there a connection here that my .cshrc got copied somehow ?

I needed to add /tmp so that CVS would work for me and pqrs due to a recent upgrade to the server...

This means you edited what you thought was his .cshrc file.
The chances are very good that you did it by accident - saving your .cshrc file in his directory during an edit session.

Let me try this one last time: a human did this by accident.

The other possibilities are so far-fetched that they don't deserve
real consideration. The person who did it needed to be able to read your files and write his files. You just indicated that you fall into that set of people. Enumerate users can read your files and write his. Those are the folks who could have done it.

It was not done by some weird environment setting.