rm -rf ./ and variants silently delete current directory contents

[sylvestre]

Component

rm -rf

Description

An issue with rm -rf: when deleting with rm -rf ., consistent with GNU rm, it refuses to delete the current directory, reports an error directly, and does not delete any contents.

❯ rm -rf .
rm: refusing to remove '.' or '..' directory: skipping '.'

However, when using rm -rf ./ or rm -rf .///, it reports an error as if the deletion failed (it should be consistent with rm -rf ., refusing directly without deleting anything), but in reality the contents of the current directory have already been deleted:

rm: cannot remove './': Invalid input

This is because the clean_trailing_slashes function collapses ./// into "./":

fn clean_trailing_slashes(path: &Path) -> &Path {
    ...
        // Checks if element at the end is a '/'
        if path_bytes[idx] == dir_separator {
            for i in (1..path_bytes.len()).rev() {
                if path_bytes[i - 1] != dir_separator {
                    idx = i;
                    break;
                }
            }
            #[cfg(unix)]
            return Path::new(OsStr::from_bytes(&path_bytes[0..=idx]));
            ...
        }
    }
    path
}

However, the path_is_current_or_parent_directory function only matches ".", "..", etc. It does not match equivalent paths like "./" or "../".

/// Checks if the path is referring to current or parent directory, if it is referring to current or any parent directory in the file tree e.g '/../..', '../..'
fn path_is_current_or_parent_directory(path: &Path) -> bool {
    let path_str = os_str_as_bytes(path.as_os_str());
    let dir_separator = MAIN_SEPARATOR as u8;
    if let Ok(path_bytes) = path_str {
        return path_bytes == ([b'.'])
            || path_bytes == ([b'.', b'.'])
            || path_bytes.ends_with(&[dir_separator, b'.'])
            || path_bytes.ends_with(&[dir_separator, b'.', b'.'])
            || path_bytes.ends_with(&[dir_separator, b'.', dir_separator])
            || path_bytes.ends_with(&[dir_separator, b'.', b'.', dir_separator]);
    }
    false
}

Test / Reproduction Steps

# Provide commands and setup to reproduce

Impact

This results in the contents of the current directory being recursively deleted.

[jacek-kurlit]

I will take this

[jacek-kurlit]

#9765