steamroot

Your mission

Refuse the delete when the target path is empty or the bare filesystem root, so an unset variable cannot wipe everything.

today's brief

January 2015. A Steam beta update ships an install script that runs rm -rf on "$STEAMROOT"/. Normally STEAMROOT points at your Steam folder. But when the variable comes back empty, that line quietly becomes rm -rf /, and a handful of Linux users watched Steam erase their whole home directory, mounted backup drives included. One missing check sat between a value and a delete. Put it back.

See it in action

safe_rm_target("/home/steam")

Expected result

Your checklist

For your own tracking. Tests grade your code.

You get root, the directory that rm -rf root/ would target.
Return 1 when it is safe to delete: root has at least one character that is not a slash.
Return 0 when root is empty, or made only of slashes (that resolves to the whole filesystem).

More examples

safe_rm_target("")

Expected result

safe_rm_target("/")

Expected result

Constraints

Expected files

guard.c

Allowed functions

None. Write every helper yourself.

Back to compete

Solutions

steamroot

Your mission

Refuse the delete when the target path is empty or the bare filesystem root, so an unset variable cannot wipe everything.

today's brief

See it in action

safe_rm_target("/home/steam")

Expected result

Your checklist

For your own tracking. Tests grade your code.

You get root, the directory that rm -rf root/ would target.
Return 1 when it is safe to delete: root has at least one character that is not a slash.
Return 0 when root is empty, or made only of slashes (that resolves to the whole filesystem).

More examples

safe_rm_target("")

Expected result

safe_rm_target("/")

Expected result

Constraints

Expected files

guard.c

Allowed functions

None. Write every helper yourself.

Back to compete

Solutions