Major Steam bug deletes all user files from hdd

[eydee]

Was anyone surprised? Steam, Origin, Uplay are malware on that other OS as well.

Feel free to not use them then. Some people like them and the freedom of choice is always nice.

[nanonyme]

Wrong, often there is an alias set for "rm" as "rm -i" (just run "alias"), but in a script the defined alias is never used.

Current GNU rm requires a long option for recursive root removal. The option is so long that there is no chance at all someone would accidentally type it in a script. No short version iirc is available. Something like --no-preserve-root or whatever

[nanonyme]

Feel free to not use them then. Some people like them and the freedom of choice is always nice.

Using Steam and pretty much any proprietary software is not only compromising your freedom but also your ability to use the software still one year later in favour of using it now. If a software can't be fixed to work with new libraries and recompiled by community, it will eventually bitrot.
That said, I do use Steam. I also use Windows and I expect to be able to keep playing the games on that when they become incompatible with the GNU/Linux systems I use

[yogi_berra]

If a software can't be fixed to work with new libraries and recompiled by community, it will eventually bitrot.

This wouldn't be true if the majority use case of loonix weren't environments where backwards compatibility is not important i.e. your average LAMP server and your average computation node.

[nanonyme]

This wouldn't be true if the majority use case of loonix weren't environments where backwards compatibility is not important i.e. your average LAMP server and your average computation node.

Well, I personally wouldn't want gigabytes extra libraries on my disk because no software made during a decade was able to have been ported to newer library versions. Yes, playing a decade old games actually is a thing that does happen and native tends to be better than emulated

[droste]

Also it's not as if modern rm wouldn't require an extra switch before accepting recursive removal on root. That bug has zero impact on any recent GNU/Linux

The problem is that the start script ran 'rm -rf $EMPTY_VAR/*' which works fine without any additional switches. It would have not been a problem if it ran 'rm -rf $EMPTY_VAR/' or 'rm -rf $EMPTY_VAR' but they chose to use the only harmful way of recursively deleting a folder

[Nobu]

Yeah, the addition of the astrisk makes all the difference.

Tested first-hand from an unpriviliged user with /home{,/*} set to 000. rm doesn't give a flying furball about whether you issue 'rm -rf /opt/teamkiller' or 'rm -rf /*'.

[Luke_Wolf]

Well, I personally wouldn't want gigabytes extra libraries on my disk because no software made during a decade was able to have been ported to newer library versions. Yes, playing a decade old games actually is a thing that does happen and native tends to be better than emulated

And Re-Engines tend to be even better

[yogi_berra]

Well, I personally wouldn't want gigabytes extra libraries on my disk because no software made during a decade was able to have been ported to newer library versions. Yes, playing a decade old games actually is a thing that does happen and native tends to be better than emulated

Storage space is so cheap these days that there is no reason to allow your OCD to rule your decision making process.

[Luke]

"Storage being cheap" is relative

Storage space is so cheap these days that there is no reason to allow your OCD to rule your decision making process.

For those of us who do non-monetized video, storage is still ferociously expensive. Consider having a 6TB filesystem half full of raw clips, and an off-site backup for everything. That is six 2 TB drives at a cost of $70 or more each, or over $400. In fact, storage is probably still the single most expensive part of my entire system.