Re: longpath.sh

[zack () RABI PHYS COLUMBIA EDU (Zack Weinberg)]

On Mon, 1 Jan 1996 16:37:01 +0200, Szekely-Benczedi Endre wrote:
>        There is a nice small shell script at www.rootshell.com,
> longpath.sh, wich exploits some bug in Linux about long pathnames...
>
> Here's the program:
[snip]

> I tried the script on a RedHat Linux, and... well... I can't erase the
> directory now ;-)
>        I wonder if anyone of you knows the problem, and can help me with
> that..

It's a widespread problem, Solaris tools get just as confused (although
nothing coredumped on me).  The script, btw, can be expressed as a perl
one-liner:

perl -e '$a = shift; while(mkdir($a, 0755)) { chdir $a; }' <dir>

which will go as deep as your OS allows.  To get rid of it, try

perl -e '$a = shift; 1 while(chdir($a));
         do { chdir("..") } while(rmdir($a));' <dir>

where <dir> is the name of the directory tree you want to create/delete.

zw