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Date: Wed, 22 Jan 2020 13:55:57 -0800
From: Paul Eggert <eggert@...ucla.edu>
To: Florian Weimer <fweimer@...hat.com>, Rich Felker <dalias@...c.org>
Cc: musl@...ts.openwall.com, 39236@...bugs.gnu.org
Subject: Re: bug#39236: coreutils cp mishandles error return from
lchmod
On 1/22/20 7:08 AM, Florian Weimer wrote:
> I think you misread what I wrote: lchmod*always* returns ENOSYS. Even
> if the file is not a symbolic link. Likewise, fchmodat with
> AT_SYMLINK_NOFOLLOW *always* returns ENOTSUP.
That's too bad, because coreutils (and many other applications, I
expect) assume that lchmod (and fchmodat with AT_SYMLINK_NOFOLLOW) to
act like chmod except not follow symlinks, in order to make it less
likely that the application will run afoul of a symlink race and chmod
the wrong file. Isn't that how the Linux fstatat call behaves? And if
so, why does glibc fstatat refuse to support this behavior?
To work around this bug, I suppose coreutils etc. should do something
like the following:
1. Never use lchmod since the porting nightmare is bad enough without it.
2. On non-glibc systems (or glibc systems where the bug is fixed), use
fchmodat with AT_SYMLINK_NOFOLLOW.
3. On glibc systems with the bug, use openat with AT_SYMLINK_NOFOLLOW
and O_PATH, and then fchmod the resulting file descriptor.
Does this sound right? Or is there some O_PATH gotcha that I haven't
thought about?
Come to think of it, perhaps the best thing would be to change Gnulib's
lchmod and fchmodat modules so that they do what applications expect,
even on buggy glibc systems. (Which would be ironic, since Gnulib's main
goal is to put wrappers around other libraries so that they look more
like glibc.)
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