Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 20:00:25 -0500
From: mark <whitroth@5-cent.us>
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Subject: [WSFA] Steam For Linux Bug Wipes Out All of a User's Files
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist@KeithLynch.net>

And they *do* mean ALL.

Story:
An anonymous reader sends a report of a bug in Steam's Linux client that
will accidentally wipe all of a user's files if they move their Steam
folder. According to the bug report: I launched steam. It did not launch,
it offered to let me browse, and still could not find it when I pointed to
the new location. Steam crashed. I restarted it. It re-installed itself
and everything looked great. Until I looked and saw that steam had
apparently deleted everything owned by my user recursively from the root
directory. Including my 3tb external drive I back everything up to that
was mounted under /media. Another user reported a similar problem \342\200\224 losing
his home directory \342\200\224 and problems with the script were found: at some
point, the Steam script sets $STEAMROOT as the directory containing all
Steam's data, then runs rm -rf "$STEAMROOT/"* later on. If Steam has been
moved, $STEAMROOT returns as empty, resulting in rm -rf "/"* which causes
the unexpected deletion.
                            -- 30 --

Story and links at
<http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/01/16/1429201/steam-for-linux-bug-wipes-out-all-of-a-users-files>

          mark