From: utzoo!decvax!cca!news@sri-unix Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards Title: Re: /dev screwed up Article-I.D.: sri-unix.2776 Posted: Wed Aug 18 21:49:42 1982 Received: Fri Aug 20 02:10:11 1982 From: greep at RAND-UNIX Remailed-date: 18 Aug 1982 1920-PDT Remailed-from: the tty of Geoffrey S. GoodfellowRemailed-to: Unix-Wizards@SRI-CSL: ; Via: Sri-Csl; 18 Aug 82 21:49-PDT Date: Sunday, 8 Aug 1982 00:39-PDT Make sure /dev is write-protected. Otherwise a common problem is a program that asks the user for some file name to output to and then deletes the file (say because it encountered an error which would make the data useless, or because it is supposed to be a temporary file). If the user enters /dev/tty and /dev is writable, that will do it. The next user who tries writing to /dev/tty will cause an ordinary file to be created. The same goes for /dev/null, /dev/mt*, etc. Of course if you have users who do things like this while running as super user, there's no hope.