Major league corruption - anyone seen anything like this?

[Paul Rubin]

Skip Montanaro <skip at pobox.com> writes:
> I'm developing a small library and accompanying wrapper.  I sometimes get a
> segmentation fault (environment is Mandrake 8.1, Python is from CVS).  Upon
> my return to the shell prompt, I discover that the /usr/local/bin/python
> link is gone as are a number of shared libraries (readline among them).
> 
> Obviously I have some serious problems in what was supposed to be a simple
> wrapper (perhaps the problems are with the underlying library which has only
> been lightly tested), but I've never seen a segfault take files with it like
> this.  Has anybody else encountered this before?

That should be impossible assuming you don't have write access to the
/usr/local/bin directory.  If you can reproduce it, it's a big Linux
security hole.