Sebastien Marie <sema...@online.fr> wrote:
> a package could use old libraries, and such libraries will not be listed by
> sysclean.
the sysclean manual page claims that it correctly identifies "obsolete
filenames".
Obsolete, adj.
1.no longer produced or used; out of date.
But this is innaccurate. By your own admission, the test it performs to
decide on whether a file is "not used" is flawed.
Yet, people continue to use rm.
> yes it will. but as sysclean only inspects files under directories controlled
> by
> the admin, it means that the administrator created such files and so they
> know
> what it is doing.
The "controlled by admin" file does not exist by default, so normally this
will look in a lot of system locations, and falsely identify unused files.
Let me be clear: the program is lying to the user. It is documented vaguely
to hide that what the program does is not truthful. It says "obsolete" all
over the place, but no actual test for that condition is performed.
> > And then someone will rm -f `sysclean`.
>
> sysclean isn't designed for such usage.
Yet, that is precisely what numerous people have done.
> I could saying the same about 'ls'. Someone will rm -f `ls` and a file named
> "/somewhere/matchingpattern/\n/etc/spwd.db" will do bad thing.
Yet, noone is doing that.
> Should we add -0 to ls ? or remove it because of possible stupid usage ?
>
> > I think sysclean is below the normal standard for our group.
>
> Yes. ls too. it could hurt users which might call rm -f `ls`. </sarcasm>
Clear you don't care that people are getting hurt by this code you wrote.
