[ale] One for systemd haters

Tue Oct 9 14:23:29 EDT 2018

It seems more likely a developer just had no idea how things are done in the real world.  He/she likely thought this would be a good name and never thought “But what if someone needs to finding something in one of the other 200 files in the /usr/lib/systemd/system subdirectory?”   If you’re a REAL coder you don’t use command line tools do you?  :D

I once worked at a place where development came up with a new way of doing something they planned to roll out to customers.   When they showed me their new way and bragged about its majestic code I told them it was truly inspired but would never work because most of the end users were lucky to have high school diplomas and would never understand the flow they were suggesting.   If A and B but not C or D then E might make sense to many in IT but for many end users A better get you to E without other (visible) considerations or they’ll stop at A and complain that it is broken.

As an FYI the “-“ at start of file name doesn’t just affect grep/egrep.   Any command that tries to look at * in a directory will have the issue because it expands that “-“ as if it were an additional flag to the command issued rather than just the start of a file name.

From: Ale [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Jim Kinney via Ale
Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2018 1:32 PM
To: DJ-Pfulio; Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] One for systemd haters

security through extra knowledge obscurity....

On Tue, 2018-10-09 at 12:19 -0400, DJ-Pfulio via Ale wrote:

Not that anyone cares, but found it on Ubuntu 16.04 ... but not in a directory

that would be modified outside the package management.

/lib/systemd/system$ ll --  -.slice

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 403 Jul 30 16:39 -.slice

If their intent was to make it hard to modify for noobs, they've succeeded.

On 10/09/2018 11:10 AM, Lightner, Jeffrey via Ale wrote:

Jim followed up saying he saw it on CentOS7.  I saw the same "-slice" file on 2 of my RHEL7 systems before I posted.  CentOS7 is compiled from RHEL7 sources.

Since he didn't see it in Fedora and you don't see it in *Suse15 it may be something that was there in earlier implementations of Systemd that they figured out was a bad idea and got rid of in later ones.   RHEL7 (and therefore CentOS7) by design doesn't update to latest and greatest of anything.  Fedora on the other hand is bleeding edge.

-----Original Message-----

From: Ale [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org<mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org>] On Behalf Of James Taylor via Ale

Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2018 11:05 AM

To: Atlanta LinuxEnthusiasts; Jim Kinney

Subject: Re: [ale] One for systemd haters

Same here. I checked on my openSUSE Leap 15 and SLES15 systems. No files starting with - IS there some special case where it is used?

-jt

James Taylor

678-697-9420

james.taylor at eastcobbgroup.com<mailto:james.taylor at eastcobbgroup.com>

Jim Kinney via Ale <ale at ale.org<mailto:ale at ale.org>> 10/9/2018 10:50 AM >>>

????? That is not what I see in my /usr/lib/systemd/system dir.

There's

exactly 0 files whose name begins with a '-'. That would be beyond dumb. I suspect a faulty distro implementation.

Checked on Fedora 28 and CentOS 7.5. No -name files.

On Tue, 2018-10-09 at 14:38 +0000, Lightner, Jeffrey via Ale wrote:

I just ran across this issue.   (Not asking for help since the link

solved it – just venting.)

https://serverfault.com/questions/844584/why-grep-doesnt-work-in-the-usr-lib-systemd-system-directory

What mentally deficient cretin in the Systemd development world

decided naming a file with a “-“ as first character was a good idea?

This is right up there with Oracle long ago deciding to name things

“core” while ignoring the fact most people had cron jobs to find

and

delete core dump files on a regular basis.

P.S.  I still generally like Systemd but this filename is a fairly

stupid thing to do.

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