Reply to post: Re: Shurley some mishtake

Future Snowden hunt starts with audit of NSA spooks' privileges

Flocke Kroes Silver badge

Re: Shurley some mishtake

Beat me to it, but I was going to go with:

genisoimage -r /embarrassing/secrets/ | wodim dev=/dev/dvdrw speed=1 -

Richard Chirgwin's "sudo cp -R * /dev/DVD" has multiple problems.

If his account does not have access to the current directory, * will expand to *

sudo does not do shell expansion as the target user by default, so cp will be instructed to copy a file or directory called *

If * does not exist, cp will complain.

If * exists and is a file (or * expanded to one name), it will be copied to the /dev directory, and will be called DVD. (These days, /dev is tmpfs, so the file will end up scattered all over the swap partition)

If * exists and is a directory (or * expanded to more than one name), cp will complain that /dev/DVD does not exist.

/dev/dvd is the default DVD-ROM. These days, DVD-ROMs are rare, and /dev/dvd will probably point to the same place as /dev/dvdrw.

I am not sure what copying a file or directory to /dev/dvdrw would actually do. I hope it would cause a meaningful error message, but if not, I have confidence that recovering any data from the DVD would be a really unpleasant task - if possible at all.

I think it is possible to mount a re-writable dvd with a filesystem, and copy files and directories to the moint point. When I read about this (over a decade ago) there was a warning about packet writing being really slow. In real life, you were better off generating an ISO image and asking wodim to transfer it to the DVD as slowly as possible (x1000 speed DVD players and x10000 speed disks were marketing numbers and had to be treated as slightly less reliable that a statement from the home secretary.)

POST COMMENT House rules

Not a member of The Register? Create a new account here.

  • Enter your comment

  • Add an icon

Anonymous cowards cannot choose their icon