From owner-freebsd-hackers  Sun Oct 17 11:46:11 1999
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To: Marc Slemko <marcs@znep.com>
Subject: Re: MAXPATHLEN not enforced 
Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
In-reply-to: Your message of "Sat, 16 Oct 1999 12:20:11 MDT."
		<Pine.BSF.4.10.9910161156420.13637-100000@alive.znep.com> 
References: <Pine.BSF.4.10.9910161156420.13637-100000@alive.znep.com>  
Date: Sun, 17 Oct 1999 12:45:38 -0600
From: Warner Losh <imp@village.org>
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In message <Pine.BSF.4.10.9910161156420.13637-100000@alive.znep.com> Marc Slemko writes:
: Why does FreeBSD let you create paths longer than MAXPATHLEN?  

Because this is allowed.

: I often have various trees that are as deep as possible for testing various
: programs for holes, and I finally figured out why locate wasn't updating its
: database properly; it was choking as soon as it saw a path length 
: >MAXPATHLEN long.  The question, however, is why can it see a path length
: longer than MAXPATHLEN?

MAXPATHLEN is the longest pathname that the kernel system calls can
handle, but it isn't the longest pathname that can exist especially
due to symbolic links.

: I would also wonder if there aren't some security issues resulting
: from this.  From what gdb shows, locate seems to trash its stack
: before spitting out the error about the path being too long...

That is an error in the program in question.  I do know that the
shells on FreeBSD haven't been well audited for buffer overflows.

Warner


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