On Wed, May 18, 2011 at 7:24 PM, Dave Reisner
I can only think of 1 reason that would happen, and it's completely ridiculous: If you bind mount things into /tmp, then recursively deleting /tmp would nuke things on the mounts as well. I don't think there's a legitimate case for this though.
rm does not follow symlinks, and my only other concern would be what happens when nullglob is set and the glob fails to expand-- but a quick test shows that not be a concern either.
Yes. I tried all these things, and it is (as far as I can tell) no way to exploit this. So we don't need to take this into consideration. The only reason to don't touch /tmp is that a) the less we do, the better b) in 99.99% of all cases it will be a noop anyway c) in the remaining cases there were some users who requested to be able to control the behavior, so why not oblige them ;-) (but they'll have to do it themselves in rc.local). -t