From owner-freebsd-fs Sun Jul 22 14:52:35 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-fs@freebsd.org Received: from elm.phenome.org (elm.phenome.org [194.153.169.3]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id B68E037B401; Sun, 22 Jul 2001 14:52:29 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from joshua@roughtrade.net) Received: from localhost (joshua@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by localhost (8.12.0.Beta7/8.12.0.Beta7/Debian 8.12.0.Beta7-1) with ESMTP id f6MLq5CC032032; Sun, 22 Jul 2001 22:52:10 +0100 Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2001 22:52:05 +0100 (BST) From: Joshua Goodall X-X-Sender: To: Terry Lambert Cc: Bakul Shah , Bruce Evans , , Subject: Re: flags on symlinks In-Reply-To: <3B5B4151.C435FF05@mindspring.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.org On Sun, 22 Jul 2001, Terry Lambert wrote: > In fact, "man chflags", and look at the "-L" argument... I > could make a good argument that it should operate on the > link itself, if given a "-l" (currently unused) argument. That was my expected result until I read the manpage completely and followed-up through the code. Initial testing and a trawl through the code shows that all ufs symlinks, at least, are first-class vnodes and support flags. NFS returns EOPNOTSUPP, cd9660, union etc returns EROFS. > Pushing the link following semantics into the kernel, instead > of the C library, was a mistake in the first place; it precludes > easy implementation of things like variant symbolic links,which > are easily handled in a user space library routine that wraps > the actual system call. Possibly, but shouldn't we be wary of changing syscall semantics? Especially in code that relates to securelevels. I guess there is general agreement that it is desirable to be able to set schg,sunlink etc on symlinks and fifos. The consistency argument goes like this: Currently exposed as accessor methods to VOP_SETATTR are: chmod(2), fchmod(2), lchmod(2) chown(2), fchown(2), lchown(2) chflags(2), fchflags(2) History records that the semantics for following symlinks in chown & chmod date from 4.4BSD. Since I have been a freebsd admin for some years without giving anything back, I would like to put this together. Joshua To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-fs" in the body of the message