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Sunday, January 18, 2015

I've been running Fedora and Debian Linux, as my main OS's, since 2005. And this is the worst Bug, in a Linux App, that I remember seeing! Glad I don't run Steam!:O...

Don

Scary Steam for Linux bug erases all the personal files on your PC

Ian Paul @ianpaul

Jan 17, 2015 9:52 AM

If you€™re a Steam fan running Linux, the last thing you'€™ll want to do in the next few days is mess with your Steam files. Users on Valve's GitHub Steam for Linux page are complaining about a nasty bug that has the potential to wipe out every single personal file on your PC. Even worse, users say the bug will even wipe out documents on USB connected drives. So much for local backups...

You can Read through the Posts on GitHub, to see what is exactly happening, here...

Moved ~/.local/share/steam. Ran steam. It deleted everything on system owned by user. #3671

Original Bug:
I am not sure what happened. I moved the folder in the title to a drive mounted under /media/user/BLAH and symlinked /home/user/.local/steam to the new location.

I launched steam. It did not launch, it offered to let me browse, and still could not find it when I pointed to the new location. Steam crashed. I restarted it.

It re-installed itself and everything looked great. Until I looked and saw that steam had apparently deleted everything owned by my user recursively from the root directory. Including my 3tb external drive I back everything up to that was mounted under /media.

Back to the Article and Skipping on down...

Steam'€™s bug appears to be caused by a line in the Steam.sh Bash script: rm -rf '€œ$STEAMROOT/'€œ*. That command is a basic Bash instruction that tells the computer to remove the STEAMROOT directory and all its sub-directories (folders).

That'€™s all well and good, but the issue is that if the STEAMROOT folder is not there then the computer interprets the command as rm -rf '€œ/'€œ*, as first reported by Bit-Tech. If you'€™re not familiar with Bash, that command tells the system to delete everything on your hard drive starting from the root directory.

The saving grace for Linux users is that you can only erase files you have write permissions over. That means the system itself can'€™t be erased, but pretty much all of a user'€™s files'€"including photos and personal documents'€"would be at risk.'

Ironically, the instruction at issue is preceded by a comment from the developer: # Scary!.