Published: April 22, 2026 | Last Modified: April 22, 2026
A vulnerability in the rm utility of uutils coreutils allows the bypass of safeguard mechanisms intended to protect the current directory. While the utility correctly refuses to delete . or .., it fails to recognize equivalent paths with trailing slashes, such as ./ or .///. An accidental or malicious execution of rm -rf ./ results in the silent recursive deletion of all contents within the current directory. The command further obscures the data loss by reporting a misleading 'Invalid input' error, which may cause users to miss the critical window for data recovery.
This analysis is generated by Ghostwire from NVD, CISA KEV, EPSS, and open-source intelligence data. Verify findings through primary sources before acting.