Re: Open by inode? (was Re: knfsd)

Linus Torvalds (torvalds@transmeta.com)
11 Jan 1999 07:38:49 GMT


In article <19990107101800.A2026@tantalophile.demon.co.uk>,
Jamie Lokier <lkd@tantalophile.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>There's really no need for extra syscalls for open-by-inode.
>
>Implement /proc/inode/NNN instead...

Note that open-by-inode() is fundamentally broken, and will not be
implemented. There are several reasons:

- it bypasses directory-based security.

You can work around this, sure, but basically it's a nasty piece of
business.

- it breaks any filesystems that don't work by inode number. For
example, a number of filesystems _need_ to know the full pathname:
any well-thought-out network filesystem (and no, I don't consider NFS
to be well-thought-out) will use pathnames, and even local
filesystems like a basic cdrom filesystem needs to know the full path
(iso9660 does not have ".." on disk - so you need to know your path
in order to know where ".." is)

Basically, only "open by name" is well-defined, anything else is a
old-fashioned concept that only makes sense on UNIX-only (and old at
that) filesystems.

Linus

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