steve@umiacs.umd.edu (02/07/90)
The Sprite operating system does this, but (from what little I know) just for $MACHINE, not for any environment variable. If I were implementing this, I'd just hardcode something into the Sprite equivalent of namei to look for $MACHINE, then turn it into an architecture name. It looks like this is what Sprite does, in fact. One thing that worries me about variant links is that you have to be a little bit careful when implementing this in order not to toss security out the window. If you can get something running as root to exec something, and diddle the path to that something so that it runs your program instead, you've now got a root shell. There are probably ways to make this secure, but I haven't given the issue a lot of thought. Spoken: Steve Miller Domain: steve@umiacs.umd.edu UUCP: uunet!mimsy!steve Phone: +1-301-454-1808 USPS: UMIACS, Univ. of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742