Pray tell me, what is the output of
find / -type l -ls | grep '${'
on your system? And on the cluster at work?
It has happened before: People have redefined a perfectly legal
character (control-Z) to have a completely different meaning. It used
to mean "send the control-Z character to the application" and now it
suddenly means "suspend application".
It is a question of choices. If you need traditional symlinks,
with '${' embedded, you get two choices:
- disable "varlinks".
- don't define the part that comes after the '${' as a variable.
I'm not yet convinced wether or not I should allow the owner of a
process to set variables. The change is easy enough to only allow
"root" to change them (in fact that's what I inadvertedly programmed
first time around... :-). That way you could prevent people from
redefining your special /usr/${*&%&^#&^#@$ link by assignling a value
to the "*&%&^#&^#@$" variable....
I hope that most people can live with the situation that the
subsequence "${" should not occur inside security critical
path of an application, and that allowing users to change their
symlinks is usually OK.
Roger.
-- If it's there and you can see it, it's REAL |___R.E.Wolff@BitWizard.nl | If it's there and you can't see it, it's TRANSPARENT | Tel: +31-15-2137555 | If it's not there and you can see it, it's VIRTUAL |__FAX:_+31-15-2138217 | If it's not there and you can't see it, it's GONE! -- Roy Wilks, 1983 |_____|- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu