This find command could have got me fired Post: 302913996

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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting This find command could have got me fired Post 302913996 by John K on Thursday 21st of August 2014 09:31:45 AM

08-21-2014

Registered User

This find command could have got me fired

Oracle Linux 6.4/Bash shell

I am not an expert in find command

I wanted to delete all files with extension .dmp which are older than 60 days. So I executed rm command from within find as show below and it
deleted ALL THE FILES (even files without any extention) which the user had permission !!!!! Luckily this was a pre-production server.
Otherwise , this would have got me fired !! This is caused because I missed -name clause in the find command.

Code:

find / "*.dmp" -mtime +60 -exec rm {} \+ 2>/dev/null

Reproducing the "issue" (my stupidity)

To be safe, in the below example, I am using ls command instead of rm and I using /tmp instead of / directory.
I am skipping -name clause in the find and the ls command will list all files from /tmp .

Code:

$ pwd
/tmp
$
$
$ touch xyz.txt
$
$ find /tmp "*.txt" -mtime +60 -exec ls -larth {} \+ 2>/dev/null

The above command does list all files which are older than 60 days in all the subdirectories in /tmp but it ignores "*.txt" and lists all
the files in /tmp

I wish find command just errored out when you skip -name clause rather that returning all the files. It is dangerous

Last edited by John K; 08-23-2014 at 07:22 AM..

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LEARN ABOUT OSX

shar

SHAR(1) 						    BSD General Commands Manual 						   SHAR(1)

NAME

     shar -- create a shell archive of files

SYNOPSIS

     shar file ...

DESCRIPTION

     shar writes an sh(1) shell script to the standard output which will recreate the file hierarchy specified by the command line operands.
     Directories will be recreated and must be specified before the files they contain (the find(1) utility does this correctly).

     shar is normally used for distributing files by ftp(1) or mail(1).

SEE ALSO

     compress(1), mail(1), tar(1), uuencode(1)

BUGS

     shar makes no provisions for special types of files or files containing magic characters.

EXAMPLES

     To create a shell archive of the program ls(1) and mail it to Rick:

	   cd ls
	   shar `find . -print` |  mail -s "ls source" rick

     To recreate the program directory:

	   mkdir ls
	   cd ls
	   ...
	   <delete header lines and examine mailed archive>
	   ...
	   sh archive

HISTORY

     The shar command appears in 4.4BSD.

SECURITY CONSIDERATIONS

     It is easy to insert trojan horses into shar files.  It is strongly recommended that all shell archive files be examined before running them
     through sh(1).  Archives produced using this implementation of shar may be easily examined with the command:

	   egrep -v '^[X#]' shar.file

4.4BSD								   June 6, 1993 							    4.4BSD

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