Strange HFS Behavior
After updating the office desktop to Slackware 15.0, the system created an .hcwd file in the system root directory. Some quick searching revealed this file is related to HFS utilities and the hmount command.
Commonly when files are created in the system root directory the reason is a less-than-robust program that is not written to validate the actual environment. Typically such programs are written with a presumption of always running in a legitimate $HOME environment, which during booting, shutdown, and in cron jobs is a poor presumption. Hence $HOME is an empty variable that creates the incorrect file path.
The curiosity is there are no HFS partitions on the office desktop. Never have been.
None of the other systems in the house network that previously had been updated to 15.0 exhibited this behavior.
After a few instances of this file being created the event has yet to again occur. A few packages have been removed in the final 15.0 fine-tuning, but none of those packages would seem responsible for creating the file.
Just to be sure, the hfsutils package was removed.
Newer is not always better.
Yet Another Example why updating computers is so frustrating.
Something always breaks. Always.
Posted: Category: Usability Tagged: Slackware
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