Re: Make mv work better with SELinux.

[Pádraig Brady]

On 10/08/2012 09:24 PM, Daniel J Walsh wrote:
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> One of if not the most common problem people hit with SELinux is the mv
> command, which maintains the file context of the source destination.
>
> mv /home/dwalsh/index.html /var/www/html/
>
> This blows up on everybody and then the users have no idea why.
>
> I was thinking about adding -Z (--restorecon) to mv and having it basically do a
> internal restorecon on the destination.
>
> Then we could suggest people who get burnt by this to:
>
> alias mv="mv -Z"
>
> In Fedora 18 we have greatly enhanced matchpathcon, by pre-compiling the
> regex, so there should be very little slow down in doing this.
>
> I will work on the patch, if people agree with the idea.

I like the idea.
Now cp and install should behave similarly,
and they already have the -Z option.
So I would suggest that cp, mv and install
support the -Z option without an argument,
which means auto set the context based on the destination.

The caveat with that is that short options
with optional args are very problematic.
So I'd just have the long --context have
an optional arg, while -Z would require an arg.

cheers,
Pádraig.