Steam for Linux Bug Can Wipe Out All Files on a PC :
Barely a fortnight into the year and we have already got ourselves a strong contender (if not a shoo-in) for the year’s scariest Steam bug. The good news is that the vast majority of Steam users don’t have anything to worry about as the bug in question, which was reported by a user named “keyvin” on Valve’s GitHub repository, only affects the Steam for Linux client.
Many Steam for Linux users have reported encountering a devastating bug when trying to launch the client after manually moving their Steam installation directory. According to GitHub user keyvin who was the first to report the bug, he had “everything owned by my user”, including all the files on a 3TB external hard drive, deleted when he tried running the Steam client after having moved the~/.local/share/steam directory.
Apparently, a line in steam.sh that reads 'rm -rf "$STEAMROOT/"*' is to blame. Meant to delete everything under the Steam data directory when the script is run with the —reset_steam option, the line can end up being interpreted as 'rm -rf "/"*' by the machine when the STEAMROOT directory is missing, causing the deletion of each and every file owned by the user.
Valve has told PCWorld that it has so far failed to reproduce the issue, adding that it is working on “some additional checks to ensure this [bug] is not possible while we continue to investigate.”
Source : www.maximumpc.com
