[comp.unix.aix] df .

jsalter@ibmpa.awdpa.ibm.com (04/17/91)

In article <1991Apr16.160043.20354@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu> kline@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (Charley Kline) writes:
>jsalter@ibmpa.awdpa.ibm.com writes:
>>You must be running on an *early* version (pre-GA?).  You need an upgrade.

No, you're not.

>Gee, I'm on the same system Phil is. It's an S6000 model 540 running 3003.
>I can't get df to misbehave either.

Oops, apologies.  Casual probing didn't uncover your problem, but was brought
to my attention that this does happen on the latest, but wasn't easily
reproducable.  After a little bit of hacking, I am now able to reproduce it:

	% df .
	Filesystem    Total KB    free %used   iused %iused Mounted on
	/dev/lv02       200704    4944   97%   12439    24% /u
	% chmod 750 .
	Filesystem    Total KB    free %used   iused %iused Mounted on
	Cannot find file system .
	%

Sure enough, if the access mode for the directory doesn't have the user's
executable bit on, df . doesn't work.  A defect has been opened.

>Charley Kline, KB9FFK, PP-ASEL                          c-kline@uiuc.edu
>University of Illinois Computing Services            Packet: kb9ffk@w9yh
>1304 W. Springfield Ave, Urbana IL  61801                 (217) 333-3339

jim/jsalter  IBM PSP, Palo Alto  T465/(415)855-4427  VNET: JSALTER at AUSVMQ
Internet: jsalter@slo.awdpa.ibm.com         UUCP: ..!uunet!ibmsupt!jsalter 
"IBM part #23521, aka Lt. Commander Data"    The stuff above is on my own.

woan@nowhere (Ronald S Woan) (04/17/91)

In article <1991Apr16.210447.28136@ibmpa.awdpa.ibm.com> jsalter@slo.awdpa.ibm.com (Jim Salter) writes:
>Sure enough, if the access mode for the directory doesn't have the user's
>executable bit on, df . doesn't work.  A defect has been opened.

Are you positive that this is a defect? I tried on an old Sun 3 (SunOS
4.??) last night and am pretty sure that I get the same error...
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shore@theory.tn.cornell.edu (Melinda Shore) (04/18/91)

In article <3783@d75.UUCP> woan@cactus.org writes:
>In article <1991Apr16.210447.28136@ibmpa.awdpa.ibm.com> jsalter@slo.awdpa.ibm.com (Jim Salter) writes:
>>Sure enough, if the access mode for the directory doesn't have the user's
>>executable bit on, df . doesn't work.  A defect has been opened.
>Are you positive that this is a defect? 

This is a bug, maybe.  In Unix filesystem semantics, if the permissions
on a directory are set up so that the relevant (to the user opening the
directory) read bits are on but the execute bits are off, the user 
should be able to read the directory but not any files in the directory.
It also means that the user should be able to stat(2) the directory.
However, it means that the user should not be able to cd into the 
directory.
Now, if the permissions look something like
	drwxr--r-- 6 shore staff 	...
shore will be able to access files in the directory, but nobody else
(other than root) will.  The only way that I can think of off the top
of my head that doing "df ." should fail for a legitimate reason
would be if df is setuid someone other than root, and the directory
permissions were as peculiar as those listed above.
-- 
                    Software longa, hardware brevis
Melinda Shore - Cornell Information Technologies - shore@theory.tn.cornell.edu

web@farpoint.austin.ibm.com (Bill Baker) (04/18/91)

>In article <3783@d75.UUCP> woan@cactus.org writes:
>>In article <1991Apr16.210447.28136@ibmpa.awdpa.ibm.com> jsalter@slo.awdpa.ibm.com (Jim Salter) writes:
>>>Sure enough, if the access mode for the directory doesn't have the user's
>>>executable bit on, df . doesn't work.  A defect has been opened.
>>Are you positive that this is a defect? 

In the old days, df had to grope the super block to determine the free
space in a file system.  As a result, df had to be set-uid root, set-uid
to the owner of the device files, or set-gid to the group id of the device
files.

Newer versions of Unix have a statfs (or statvfs) system call that returns
interesting file system statistics given the name of any file in the file
system.  That makes "df ." trivial to implement.  Df in AIX was coded to
use statfs.  However, it was mistakenly left set-uid bin.  This means that
df will fail in any directory that does not give search access to bin.

This has already been fixed in AIX V3.1.5.

web
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