Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2001 22:52:05 +0100 (BST) From: Joshua Goodall <joshua@roughtrade.net> To: Terry Lambert <tlambert2@mindspring.com> Cc: Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com>, Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>, <freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.ORG>, <freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: Re: flags on symlinks Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0107222216530.4671-100000@elm.phenome.org> In-Reply-To: <3B5B4151.C435FF05@mindspring.com>
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On Sun, 22 Jul 2001, Terry Lambert wrote: > In fact, "man chflags", and look at the "-L" argument... I > could make a good argument that it should operate on the > link itself, if given a "-l" (currently unused) argument. That was my expected result until I read the manpage completely and followed-up through the code. Initial testing and a trawl through the code shows that all ufs symlinks, at least, are first-class vnodes and support flags. NFS returns EOPNOTSUPP, cd9660, union etc returns EROFS. > Pushing the link following semantics into the kernel, instead > of the C library, was a mistake in the first place; it precludes > easy implementation of things like variant symbolic links,which > are easily handled in a user space library routine that wraps > the actual system call. Possibly, but shouldn't we be wary of changing syscall semantics? Especially in code that relates to securelevels. I guess there is general agreement that it is desirable to be able to set schg,sunlink etc on symlinks and fifos. The consistency argument goes like this: Currently exposed as accessor methods to VOP_SETATTR are: chmod(2), fchmod(2), lchmod(2) chown(2), fchown(2), lchown(2) chflags(2), fchflags(2) History records that the semantics for following symlinks in chown & chmod date from 4.4BSD. Since I have been a freebsd admin for some years without giving anything back, I would like to put this together. Joshua To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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