/tmp is world-writable. If you get permission-errors, you should become suspicious.
Also, whenever you write “sudo rm -rf” you should quadruple-check if that’s really what you want to do.
Non-interactively deleting entire directories in root space isn’t something you should have to do normally.
Exactly! if a service running under root creates a file, it belongs to root. if that file has permissions that don’t allow other users to write (most do), then you can’t delete it without sudo afaik
Agreed, I should have been more careful. Fortunately it was just my downloads folder.
In wanted to clear my /tmp, because I’d run out of space there for extracting an ISO file. It lives on a tmpfs, so space is quite limited.
I ran the command without sudo first. It had a bunch of permission errors removing stuff in
/tmp. So I retried but with sudo/tmp is world-writable. If you get permission-errors, you should become suspicious.
Also, whenever you write “sudo rm -rf” you should quadruple-check if that’s really what you want to do.
Non-interactively deleting entire directories in root space isn’t something you should have to do normally.
/tmp might be world writable but everything created in there belongs to the respective users.
TIL. Makes sense, though.
Exactly! if a service running under root creates a file, it belongs to root. if that file has permissions that don’t allow other users to write (most do), then you can’t delete it without sudo afaik
Agreed, I should have been more careful. Fortunately it was just my downloads folder.
In wanted to clear my /tmp, because I’d run out of space there for extracting an ISO file. It lives on a tmpfs, so space is quite limited.