> This also protects against all sorts of nasty games with symlinks,
> for example the well - known xterm bug, where the program did, as root,
> open("somefile");
> <=== user could do a "rm somefile; ln -s /etc/profile somefile"
> chown(user,group,"somefile");
I don't know this problem; a race-condition in the xterm code.
When symlinks were first introduced, in some implementations the support
was less than perfect. Setting .plan to be a symlink to an unaccessible
file and then 'finger usrname', and a nice race condition with some
printer daemons. Not the kernel's fault, and definitly not the fault
of chown(2) for following symlinks in those implementations :)
markhe