Security risk how to use find recommended in php.ini-*

This is very wrong to recommend: ; NOTE: If you are using the subdirectory option for storing session files [...] ;          find /path/to/sessions -cmin +24 | xargs rm because it is prone to '\n' attack. You can see the security considerations of GNU find. Much better would be: find /path/to/sessions -cmin +24 -delete or at least find /path/to/sessions -cmin +24 -execdir rm "{}" \; (GNU find) The most error-prone way is something we cooked up in Debian: find /var/lib/php5/ -depth -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -type f -ignore_readdir_race -cmin +24 ! -execdir fuser -s {} 2>/dev/null \; -delete which depends on fuser at least version 22.15 (which has removed fork() call which was able to swamp up whole system with zombies). The fuser call checks if the session file is still in use, because the script was deleting still active sessions opened 24+ mins ago. O. -- Ondřej Surý <ondrej@sury.org>