[20] in OS/2_Discussion
Re: What about Unix?
tytso@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (tytso@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Wed Jan 22 11:22:46 1992
Well, it's not just the malicious "blowing away the machine" that I'm
worried about. It's someone accidentally typing format c: when they
meant to type format a:, or someone who accidentally types del *.* in
the wrong directory. You really want real filesystem protection bits.
I suppose the MS-LOSS R/O attribute is a start, but that only protects
you from system files, and then typically only executables. You really
want a more powerful protection system, even on a "single-user" machine.
Anyway, I suspect most PC's are used by more than one person anyway, so
you really want an OS which is at least "single-user" in the same sense
that an public Athena workstation is "single-user" --- that is, serially
single-user, and you want to protect the current user from the previous
user of the machine.
Sigh... it would have cost the OS/2 designers so little to put in a file
ownership byte and permission bits in the HPFS. I can even think of
ways to do it in backwards compatible manner on a MS-LOSS filesystem (a
hidden file in each directory which contains the file ownership
information).
