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To: Bruce Evans <bde@zeta.org.au>
cc: msmith@comtch.iea.com, nlawson@kdat.csc.calpoly.edu, security@FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: Suspicious symlinks in /tmp 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Wed, 28 Feb 1996 02:03:09 +1100."
             <199602271503.CAA03513@godzilla.zeta.org.au> 
From: David Greenman <davidg@Root.COM>
Reply-To: davidg@Root.COM
Date: Tue, 27 Feb 1996 08:46:14 -0800
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>>However, the bug that I have seen for quite a while and complained about is
>>that a symlink is owned by the owner of the file it points to, not by the
>>creator of the symlink.  That is a bad idea and I really can't see the logic
>>behind doing that.
>
>>Could someone explain this behavior?
>
>The symlink is owned by the owner of its parent directory.
>
>I think this is to conform to future POSIX standards.  Many other things
>involving symlinks changed in 4.4lite.  See `man 7 symlink'.

   NetBSD recently went back to the previous/traditional behavior for
symlinks. I think we should too - the "new" model is incompatible with
sticky bit directories.

-DG

David Greenman
Core-team/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project