Reported live: Samba broke on the home box after this ran. Root cause
confirmed by reproducing it directly: the old removal step used
`sed -i "/^\[share\]$/,/^$/d"` — a range delete from the share's header
through the next BLANK line. A home box whose smb.conf has no blank line
separating sections (common — nothing requires one) means that range
never finds a terminator and sed deletes straight through to end of file,
taking every share defined after the target one down with it. Reproduced
against a 4-section smb.conf with no blank lines: the old approach left
only [global] standing, silently destroying two unrelated, pre-existing
shares that had nothing to do with this tool.
Replaced with an awk pass that removes lines from the target share's own
[header] up to the next `[section]` header or EOF — the actual boundary
of an INI-style section, independent of blank-line formatting. Also now
builds the new config in a scratch file and validates it with `testparm`
before it's ever copied over the live smb.conf; on validation failure it
leaves the existing file untouched and exits instead of restarting smbd
against a config that might not even parse. The existing
smb.conf.backup.<timestamp> step (already present before this fix) is
what the user is recovering the home box with in the meantime.
Verified the fix against the exact reproduction: the same 4-section,
no-blank-line smb.conf now retains all three untouched sections after
removing only the target one.
Claude
a2d3b0a651