TL;DR for anybody worried. systemd-tmpfiles --purge was too broad in scope (and has a confusing name) so now you must be more specific when using it to avoid accidentally deleting things.
this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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But you should have read the docs completely and figured that out /s
using systemd instead of rm -Rf is not the Unix way!
Namaste.
Yeah that's a big one.
Oops
Thanks Microsoft
I've been saying, Microsoft hired Poettering to thank him for fucking up Linux so much with systemd.
Thanks Microsoft for spotting that, and thanks to Google and CloudFlare for blocking or redirecting Polifyll.io network traffic.
Credit where credit is due.
a "bug"
If it was intended but not properly documented as it says, why does it keep being called a bug?
The bug is the lack of documentation and that a simple unguarded command can erase all user's data on the system.
Also, the principle of least surprise would like a word.
If I look at the command line arguments of a program called "systemd-tmpfiles" and one of them is called "purge" I will generally assume that option will purge temporary files.
Now it turns out that someone decided that this program would be a simple way to do something with /home directories(*) so they included /home in the config file for the program, the file that the program reads by default when it is invoked.
Who decided it would be a good idea for it to deal with /home?
Wellllll...
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/blob/main/tmpfiles.d/home.conf
(*)I have no idea what this program is doing with /home in its config file. I will presume that there is a useful and mostly logical reason for it, and that this command line option was just an unfortunate footgun for those users who were not intimately familiar with systemd.
There were talks a few years ago about changing sd-tmpfiles name but it was decide not worth it due to the churn and bikeshedding it would cause.
sd-tmpfiles is generally used to create, modify (e.g. permissions) and remove directories on the system. The home.conf is intended for systems that only ship /usr/ (e.g. containers) to create /home/ and /srv/ as a separate subvolume on btrfs
I will presume that there is a useful and mostly logical reason for it
Home directories are temporary, obviously
“Breaking userspace” is often considered a bug even if the code doing so is working as intended. Deleting user data because they bundle a config file deep in the directory tree for a completely different use case was not intended behavior even if one of them is defensive about the logic.
it was clearly a feature
Oh that’s a good normal thing for it to do.
So it doesn't break userspace anymore?