guy@rlgvax.UUCP (Guy Harris) (01/14/84)
This looks like an extra link made to "/usr" in "/usr/spool/lpd" (the
"lfaXXXXX" files are made when a print job is queued and the file to
be printed is on the same file system as "/usr/spool/lpd"). The
S3 spooler (the V7 spooler is almost identical) does *not* check whether
a file to be printed is a directory, and it may run set-UID to root, so it
can (and probably will) make a link to that directory in "/usr/spool/lpd"
if that directory is on the same file system. So if somebody says
lpr /usr
this could happen, and would confuse the heck out of UNIX. Those spoolers
should probably be modified to refuse to print a directory - since directories
are binary files, I can't imagine any printer which would do something
meaningful if you shoved the contents of that directory file a byte at a time
to them. Any other spoolers which make links like this should also be fixed
in the same fashion.
Guy Harris
{seismo,ihnp4,allegra}!rlgvax!guy