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Re: recursive commands


From: Craig Allan Jeffree
Subject: Re: recursive commands
Date: Tue, 02 Apr 2002 23:11:11 +1000
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.8) Gecko/20020205

Oystein Viggen wrote:

* [Craig Allan Jeffree]
old = open(".");
chdir("foo);
delete stuff
fchdir(old);
delete more stuff

Isn't this potentially racey as well?  I can see that fchdir(old); will
definately take you back to the parent of "foo" but how can you be sure
that the directories aren't moved around between step 1 and 2?  You
could end up in a different "foo" to what you intended, I guess this is
a different issue - but it is still an issue isn't it?


I think the way rm already does that part is: d=open("foo", 'r', O_DIRECTORY|O_NOFOLLOW); fchdir(d);

If you don't do that, even in regular unix, a user can rename the dir
and exchange it with a symlink to / or whatever beneath your feet
between steps 1 and 2.

I've had other things to do in the easter, but I'll see if I can come up
with some translator stuff on top of this soon  :)

Oystein

This would just keep going back a step. "foo" could be changed at any point between its discovery and the open syscall. Obviously the user could look at the directory listing then run "rm -r foo", but in the time it takes for them to type the command someone else could change the directory tree - that is always going to be racey. But internally to rm how can the discovery of a directory (from the directory recurse not the command line) be kept atomic with the entering of that directory?

Regards,
Craig.





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