How to avoid accidental root access to non-world-readable directories?

Question

Given the following directory:

drwx------ 2 joe joe 4096 Jan 11  2010 /home/joe

Is there a way for me as the user root, to avoid accidentally cd-ing into this directory?

I'm not looking for actual permission enforcement, but for some setting (e.g. in the bash shell) that helps the root user avoid such a "private" directory.

Answer 1

There's no way of preventing root from accessing the directory - within a Unix system root is omnipotent.

As to accidentally doing it.....it depends on what you are using to access the directory.

You might try....

export PS1="\u@\h [\$(check_path.sh)]>

Where check_path.sh is something like...

#!/bin/bash

if [ `whoami` = 'root' -a `pwd` = '/home/joe'] ; then
   echo -n "!!!!!!accessing /home/joe as root !!!!!!!!!"
fi

Answer 2

You could write a script inside .bashrc

something like ... if [ command == "cd /home/joe" ] do ask done