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Date:      Sat, 09 Nov 2002 18:23:22 -0800 (PST)
From:      =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Mikko_Ty=F6l=E4j=E4rvi?= <mbsd@pacbell.net>
To:        joe <joe-dated-1037323668.d621ae@dubium.com>
Cc:        FreeBSD Questions <freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG>
Subject:   Re: REASON #7919 NOT to do things as root!
Message-ID:  <20021109181537.X321-100000@atlas.home>
In-Reply-To: <200211091725.54547.joe@dubium.com>

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On Sat, 9 Nov 2002, joe wrote:

> While playing around and trying to set aup a chroot environment
> I did the following
> cd /home/honza
> mkdir {etc,dev,lib,bin,.....}
>
> cat /etc/passwd | grep honza >/etc/passwd
>                                                  ^<== location of the
>                                                           typing oops
> The leading "/" was unintended.
>
> Aaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh

Been there, done that.  I once had an uninstall script running as root
with the following line:

  rm -rf $TOPDRI/*	# Yup, should have been "TOPDIR"

The result was something like "My mind is going, Dave..."

> Now that everyone has gotten back off their seats from the laughter, on
> a more serious note is there anything I can do.  Let's pretend I don't
> have a backup.  .....  ok, now that you've stopped laughing again ....
>
> Is there anything I can do to recover /etc/passwd

If you haven't fatfingered your master.passwd too, just do:

 # pwd_mkdb -p /etc/master.passwd

Otherwise, if the box has been up for a while, there should be a
backup file, so:

 # cp /var/backups/master.passwd.bak /etc/master.passwd
 # pwd_mkdb -p /etc/master.passwd

> I just double checked and still seem to have access using other accounts
> and I've made a copy of master.passwd in case I "commit" the changes
> from passwd.

Data is copied in the other direction.  There is a reason the file
is called "master".passwd...

   $.02,
   /Mikko


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