Re: Publically writable directories

[wfp5p () tigger itc virginia edu (Bill Pemberton)]

Jim Hutchins writes:
> After thinking about this and watching some of the replies, I believe
> the absolute answer is no, you cannot avoid a race condition on all
> platforms.  open(2) will follow a symbolic link on the platforms I
> tried, with or without O_EXCL.  Depending on what you are trying to
> do, a couple possible solutions are:

Which platforms were that?  For the elm bug I tested the code on a bunch of
platforms and it did not follow the symlink.  The platforms I personally
tested it on included AIX 3, AIX 4, Solaris 2, SunOS 4, IRIX 4, IRIX 5.  The
other elm folks have tried on many other operating systems.

I've assumed that there were some systems out there that didn't behave
correctly, but it appears to be rare.

--
Bill Pemberton                           wfp5p () virginia edu
ITC/Unix Systems                         flash () virginia edu
University of Virginia                   uunet!virginia!wfp5p