I'm certainly no expert, so there could easily be some security issues that I'm not seeing right now, but... It seems to me that the CAP_DAC_READ_SEARCH capability ought to allow readlink() to succeed on a "magic symlink" even when the uid/gid would otherwise disallow it. The capabilities(7) man page says: CAP_DAC_READ_SEARCH * Bypass file read permission checks and directory read and execute permission checks; etc. This could be handy to see what files a process has open without using full-blown root priv. E.g., "ls -l /proc/nnnn/fd/" run via setpriv or capsh. Thanks for listening, -Jeff --------- The following illustrates the current situation. 'rsudo' is a personal script I use to run a command with dac_read_search; sort of a 'read only' version of sudo. (I really should clean it up a bit and post it somewhere.) jeff@ups:~$ ls -l /proc/1/fd/0 ls: cannot access '/proc/1/fd/0': Permission denied jeff@ups:~$ sudo ls -l /proc/1/fd/0 lrwx------ 1 root root 64 Oct 23 13:48 /proc/1/fd/0 -> /dev/null jeff@ups:~$ sudo readlink /proc/1/fd/0 /dev/null jeff@ups:~$ rsudo ls -l /proc/1/fd/0 ls: cannot read symbolic link '/proc/1/fd/0': Permission denied lrwx------ 1 root root 64 Oct 23 13:48 /proc/1/fd/0 jeff@ups:~$ rsudo readlink /proc/1/fd/0 The first 'rsudo' above ran the cmd: sudo setpriv --inh-caps +dac_read_search --ambient-caps +dac_read_search --reuid=1000 --regid=1000 --init-groups -- ls -l /proc/1/fd/0 The second did the same for 'readlink /proc/1/fd/0'