Stopping file deletion wth "find"

[Malcolm McKenzie]

If you touch a file called -i then anyone trying to delete a file in that directory will be asked for confirmation. Is there a similar way of stopping someone running a find command to delete files?

[Pete Randall]

A find command by itself doesn't delete files, it uses rm to do so. I would think the -i technique should still work. Have you tried it?


Pete

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi:

One thing you can (should) certainly do is to set the sticky-bit on the *directory* level. This allows only the owner of a file to delete it:

# chmod 1777 mydir

See the man pages for 'chmod' for more information.

Regards!

...JRF...

[Chris Vail]

Actually, the -i thing DOESN'T stop anyone from removing a file. If the user types in rm FILENAME, the file is removed regardless of whether or not a -i is in the directory. This is an old Unix hackers trick to slow down someone using rm *. Because -i will almost always be the first directory listed after . (dot) and .. (dot dot), the rm command interprets this as an argument, rather than the file that it really is.

The answer to your question is you really can't protect users from themselves. Hopefully, you don't let them have any privledged accounts (like root) where they can do any real damage. If a user is smart enough to use the find command, they'll also find a way to delete a file using it.


Chris