Michael Haggerty <mhag...@alum.mit.edu> writes:
> One race is still possible and undetected: another process could
> change the file from a regular file into a symlink between the call to
> lstat and the call to open(). The open() call would silently follow
> the symlink and not know that something is wrong. I don't see a way
> to detect this situation without the use of the O_NOFOLLOW option,
> which is not portable and is not used elsewhere in our code base.
>
> However, we don't use symlinks anymore, so this situation is unlikely.
> And it doesn't appear that treating a symlink as a regular file would
> have grave consequences; after all, this is exactly how the code
> handles non-relative symlinks.
You could fstat() the fd you got from open(), and verify that it is
still the same inode/device. That's wasting one syscall per ref for
pretty much everyone, but perhaps if we really cared about this (and I
gather from the above that we don't), we could conditionally use
O_NOFOLLOW if available, otherwise do that fstat().
--
Thomas Rast
trast@{inf,student}.ethz.ch
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