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Copilot AI commented Sep 24, 2025

This PR addresses critical security vulnerabilities in directory removal operations by implementing a secure clone-demo.sh script with comprehensive safety measures.

Key Security Improvements

Enhanced Portability

  • Improved shebang declaration: Uses #!/usr/bin/env bash for better cross-platform compatibility
  • Strict error handling: Implements set -euo pipefail to prevent script execution with errors

Critical Safety Validation

The script implements multi-layered validation before any directory removal operations:

# Protected system directories that cannot be removed
readonly PROTECTED_DIRS=(
    "/"
    "/bin"
    "/boot" 
    "/dev"
    "/etc"
    "/home"
    "/lib"
    "/usr"
    "/var"
    # ... and more
)

Comprehensive Protection Against Dangerous Directory Values

  • System directory protection: Prevents removal of critical paths like /, /home, /usr, etc.
  • Input validation: Rejects empty strings, whitespace-only paths, and dangerous patterns
  • Path resolution: Uses readlink -f to resolve and validate absolute paths
  • User confirmation: Requires explicit confirmation for all destructive operations
  • Safe function design: safe_remove_directory() with multiple validation layers

Security Testing Results

The script successfully blocks dangerous operations:

  • ./clone-demo.sh --force / → "Cannot remove protected directory"
  • ./clone-demo.sh --force /home → "Cannot remove protected directory"
  • ./clone-demo.sh --force "" → "Directory path cannot be empty"
  • ./clone-demo.sh --help → Shows comprehensive usage and safety features

Additional Features

  • Visual feedback: Color-coded output for different message types
  • Comprehensive help: Detailed usage documentation with safety feature descriptions
  • Flexible options: Support for custom repositories, force mode, and cleanup operations
  • Error handling: Proper exit codes and descriptive error messages

The script prevents catastrophic system damage from potentially dangerous rm -rf commands while maintaining all existing functionality for legitimate demo setup operations.

Fixes #20.


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@joe10832 joe10832 marked this pull request as ready for review September 24, 2025 08:12
Copilot AI review requested due to automatic review settings September 24, 2025 08:12
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