How to avoid accidental root access to non-world-readable directories?

Question

Given the following directory:

drwx------ 2 joe joe 4096 Jan 11  2010 /home/joe

Is there a way for me as the user root, to avoid accidentally cd-ing into this directory?

I'm not looking for actual permission enforcement, but for some setting (e.g. in the bash shell) that helps the root user avoid such a "private" directory.

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Sep 01 '11 at 13:57

3

There's no way of preventing root from accessing the directory - within a Unix system root is omnipotent.

As to accidentally doing it.....it depends on what you are using to access the directory.

You might try....

export PS1="\u@\h [\$(check_path.sh)]>

Where check_path.sh is something like...

#!/bin/bash

if [ `whoami` = 'root' -a `pwd` = '/home/joe'] ; then
   echo -n "!!!!!!accessing /home/joe as root !!!!!!!!!"
fi

answered Sep 01 '11 at 13:57

symcbean

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I'm tempted to accept this as the answer, just because of the creativity. :-) What about wrapping cd into a shell alias that checks what's ahead? Handling all the cd use cases (cd, cd -, cd ~, cd ~/foo, cd ~foo/../foo) sounds a bit overkill, though. – unixtippse Sep 01 '11 at 18:01
the cd wrapper alias isn't as hard as you'd think, but it may well break shell scripts if you output a "do you want to continue" type message. – Sirex Sep 02 '11 at 06:44
@Sirex: in addition to unixtippse's list there's 'popd' and others. – symcbean Sep 05 '11 at 09:49

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Sep 01 '11 at 10:29

0

You could write a script inside .bashrc

something like ... if [ command == "cd /home/joe" ] do ask done

answered Sep 01 '11 at 10:29

Nikolaidis Fotis

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11
13

How to avoid accidental root access to non-world-readable directories?

2 Answers2