Systemd 256.1 Maintenance Release Fixes Home Directory Deletion Bug

slack_justyb writes:

A critical issue has been discovered in the Systemd system manager version 256 that caused the deletion of the contents of the /home partition when executing the “systemd-tmpfiles –purge” command. This command, added in Systemd 256, was intended to delete all files and directories created through settings in tmpfiles.d. However, due to a misleading name, it appeared that the deletion only affected temporary files, while in reality, it also removed non-existent data directories. The bug was initially dismissed by a Systemd developer, who suggested that users should have read the documentation before running the command. However, it was later acknowledged that the documentation was outdated and did not accurately reflect the behavior of the systemd-tmpfiles utility.

After much discussion, the program's operation was found to be flawed and this update was issued for anyone who upgraded to the newest release. No distros are known to be using this release at this time. The maintenance release of systemd is considered a critical fix and users are urged to update to the latest version as soon as possible.