bug in permissions on symlinks

Martin Pool mbp at samba.org
Sat Dec 8 00:05:44 EST 2001


On  7 Dec 2001, Cameron Simpson <cs at zip.com.au> wrote:

> Please don't take this path - ownerships on symlinks are a pretty
> meaningless concept

Right.  For just this reason I just changed the regression test to use
an included "tiny ls", rather than the system's ls, because on some
systems the permissions and ownership it reports for symlinks can be
randomly wierd.  

For example, on FreeBSD the perm bits on a symlink are set to 0777 &
~umask, but they can't be chmodded and they have no effect on its
behaviour.  Havoc for test cases that try to diff two directory
listings!

> Why _not_ take the conservation approach "unless somebody reports a
> problem" [sic]?

I'll speak to tridge, but I think we should pull this line out because
of the scenario Cameron describes.

--
Martin						(Now on ZX12-R)





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