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stablestud / adsorber

Ad-blocker for Linux systems purely built on POSIX-compliant shell scripts.
MIT License
76 stars 10 forks source link

Do not discard changes in hosts file #14

Closed eksperimental closed 3 years ago

eksperimental commented 3 years ago

Besides the comment, I think AdSorber should not discard changes in /etc/hosts. What it should, I think, is make the block of hosts delimited with a start and end comment. Leave a comment saying this block will be overwritten in the next update, but only delete these chunk and preserve the rest of the file as is

stablestud commented 3 years ago

Hi @eksperimental,

You can make your changes to the hosts file persistent by adding them to /etc/hosts.original instead of /etc/hosts.

Background info:

stablestud commented 3 years ago

But I've to admit, the documentation does not give any information how to add persistent values. Will add it later today.

eksperimental commented 3 years ago

Hi @eksperimental,

You can make your changes to the hosts file persistent by adding them to /etc/hosts.original instead of /etc/hosts.

Background info:

* Adsorber creates `/etc/hosts.original` as the backup of the original `/etc/hosts` and it'll be used as the base when its updating the hosts file.

* Also when you remove adsorber from the system or when you disable it with `adsorber disable` the hosts file will be restored to its original form by moving `/etc/hosts.original` to `/etc/hosts` leaving it like adsorber has never been there.

thank you for your answer. Yes, I know that. but it just happened to me that I edited the files and when I upgraded my system, I realized the changes were lost. From a usability point of view if the software can mark the edited section and only modify that, It is less overhead for the user. Also, what happens when there is another software that also edit /etc/hosts ?

stablestud commented 3 years ago

When another application is writing to /etc/hosts the changes are gone. I never thought about that.

Is there any application that does write to /etc/hosts? To my knowledge Docker does that but only inside a container.

eksperimental commented 3 years ago

another software like adsorber, or maybe command line instructions, or custom bash functions such as https://gist.github.com/irazasyed/a7b0a079e7727a4315b9

It should not be expected that someone will open up the file and read the initial comment saying it should not be edited. Well, those are my two cents

stablestud commented 3 years ago

Ok I see, you are right. I'll see what I can do.

Thanks for reporting.

eksperimental commented 3 years ago

Awesome and thank you. perl seems like the right tool for the job. Let me know if I can help with anything. But any tool that can use a regex and replace will do

stablestud commented 3 years ago

I would like to stick to sed. It's already being used, and perl would be another dependency. Expect a new version somewhere around the weekend.

eksperimental commented 3 years ago

Thank you @stablestud