Re: [PATCH] open: O_DIRECTORY and O_CREAT together should fail

From: Andrew Morton
Date: Fri Sep 23 2005 - 14:30:00 EST


Miklos Szeredi <miklos@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
> Add a check for O_DIRECTORY in the O_CREAT path, and return -EINVAL.
>
> Current behavior is inconsistent with documentation:
> open(..., O_DIRECTORY|O_CREAT) succeeds if file didn't exist, and
> returned descriptor does not refer to a directory.
>
> No other error value quite fits this case:
>
> ENOTDIR - the file doesn't exist, so this is slightly misleading
> ENOENT - yes, but we asked for an O_CREAT so why wasn't it created
>
> But EINVAL - invalid combination of flags, is quite good IMO.
>

We could be a bit screwed here. If there are any apps out there which are
using this combination, we just broke them. Essentially the patch is
assuming that nobody is currently using O_CREAT|O_DIRECTORY, but one day in
the future someone will do that.


>
> Index: linux/fs/namei.c
> ===================================================================
> --- linux.orig/fs/namei.c 2005-09-23 16:35:32.000000000 +0200
> +++ linux/fs/namei.c 2005-09-23 16:36:19.000000000 +0200
> @@ -1441,6 +1441,9 @@ int open_namei(const char * pathname, in
> return error;
> goto ok;
> }
> + /* O_CREAT | O_DIRECTORY should fail */
> + if (flag & O_DIRECTORY)
> + return -EINVAL;
>
> /*
> * Create - we need to know the parent.
-
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