ccea3@rivm.UUCP (Adri Verhoef) (09/22/88)
Hiya, a few months ago I posted a problem involving 'cpio': 'cpio' does not work when it cannot open one of its parent directories. Repeat-by: $ id uid=104(ccea3) gid=101(cce) $ cd /usr/tmp $ mkdir tst1; cd tst1 $ mkdir tst2; cd tst2 $ chgrp bin .. $ chown bin .. $ pwd /usr/tmp/tst1/tst2 $ touch bugs.cpio $ cpio -itv < bugs.cpio sh: pwd: cannot open .. $ ls -ld . .. drwxr-x--- 2 ccea3 cce 32 May 31 22:04 . drwxr-x--- 3 bin bin 48 May 31 22:04 .. Our vendor finally replied, saying: Brief Problem Description : cpio does work correctly when it cannot open it parent directory. Reply : It is the natural feature of sh. This feature will be taken into consideration in the new release of sh. The real question was: Why do some programs use getcwd(3C) in cases that they really don't need to, or why don't they try to recover from a getcwd(3C) error if it is not really important to know where we are. mcvax!vsedev.VSE.COM!logan (James Logan III) replied: >how often does someone lock the door behind them without having a >key to get back out? :) We do have a certain application that does run under certain privileges, for that matter. >In answer to your question about why certain programs call >getpwd(), Perhaps AT&T is trying to make it more difficult to do >anything useful in the above scenario, which is a mild security >violation. (I say mild because the directory contents couldn't >have been too sensitive if you had access just a moment before.) > > Jim Regards, Adri Verhoef, mcvax!rivm!a3.