Nuke

Eli Schwartz eschwartz at archlinux.org
Sun Jun 21 02:55:38 UTC 2020


On 6/20/20 7:26 AM, Mike Davies wrote:
> So whos brilliant idea was it to select 'nuke' to be built by default ?
> 
> There is no documentation online for it.
> 
> You happen to type in nuke ..
> 
> and bye bye file system
> 
> Would it not be more sensible to disable it by default ?
While I agree it is a stupid applet -- it is literally an alias for rm
-rf, and defined as such by the menuconfig help -- I would also like to
point out that './busybox nuke --help' will emit help output for it. And
you should not "happen" to type in suspicious arguments to commands you
don't understand, it's a lot more understandable for "nuke .." to do
something wrong than "nuke -h" or "nuke --help".


(It's also true that by design, to mimic the historical behavior of the
tool it copies from, it takes no arguments, ignores most sanity checks
and has a completely useless return status. I suppose --help slips by
because it's parsed before the applet itself?)

...

Honestly I just strip this out of my busybox builds on the grounds I
don't need completely useless code bloating the binary, even if it is
"only 2.9 kb". People should just use the rm applet, which is well known
and has much more intuitive behavior, rather than having a second applet
just to run with -rf. I'm not sure why it's considered valuable enough
to enable by default.

-- 
Eli Schwartz
Arch Linux Bug Wrangler and Trusted User

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