If you’re a Linux user and a gamer, chances are you have Steam installed. But according to users on the GitHub page for the Linux version of Steam, Valve has a horrible bug in the current release that can cause a bash statement to return your entire home directory as a target for deletion.
Github user keyvin reported that moving his Steam directory, which by default is saved to /home/user/.local/steam, to run off of an external drive via a shortcut caused him to lose everything under ownership of his owner as well as the contents of a 3TB drive for backups.
“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.User pythoneer also found an older bug where “rm -rf "$STEAMROOT/"* could be evaluated as rm -rf "/"* if $STEAMROOT is empty”. For those unfamiliar with bash, rm is the command to delete a file, and –rf is a parameter that recursively force-deletes files and directories contained within.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.”
keyvin repoted that the system in use was Ubuntu 14.04, with the target drive for Steam being formatted as NTFS. The author was able to successfully replicate this issue with the current version of Steam on Fedora 21 and was able to perform this on drives formatted as both NTFS as well as exFAT.
For now, the best way to avoid this bug is to avoid using any sort of link in place of the .steam directory. Valve has not officially commented on the bug, but given Gabe Newell’s numerous statements about SteamOS and Linux being a huge part of the future of Valve, as well as the attention this bug in particular is getting, this will likely be a priority for them. As always, TechRaptor encourages users to keep reliable backups of all files.
