On Tue, Apr 26, 2016 at 02:41:37PM -0400, Valdis.Kletnieks@xxxxxx wrote: > On Tue, 26 Apr 2016 18:55:38 +0100, Al Viro said: > > > It is a change of user-visible behaviour, but I would be very > > surprised if anything broke from that change. And it would help to simplify > > the awful mess we have in there. > > I have to admit that over the past 3 decades of working with Unix-y systems, > there's been a number of times I've had to resort to 'od -cx /your/dir/here' > to debug issues (/bin/ls -fi is *almost* equivalent, but doesn't show holes > in the directory) > > The biggest danger I can see is some shell script doing something like: > > foobar > $dir/$targetfile > > and $targetfile is unset. If we allow a program to get an open fd that refers > to a directory, what are the semantics of various operations on that fd? Huh? We certainly do allow to get an open fd that refers to a directory - how else could ls(1) possibly work? See getdents(2) - it does use an open file descriptor to specify the directory we operate upon. We also do not allow opening directories for *write*, and in that case EISDIR is the right error (and we do return it). The corner case in question is different: * O_CREAT present * O_EXCL absent * O_RDWR absent * O_WRONLY absent * pathname refers to existing directory That's where POSIX says "just open it for read, as if O_CREAT hadn't been there" and we fail with EISDIR. With both O_CREAT and O_EXCL POSIX says "fail with EEXIST" and we either do that or fail with EISDIR, depending on the pathname details. With either of O_RDWR and O_WRONLY POSIX says "fail with EISDIR, O_CREAT or no O_CREAT" and that's what we do (and would certainly keep doing so). If you look at the code you'll see case S_IFDIR: if (acc_mode & MAY_WRITE) return -EISDIR; in may_open() and error = -EISDIR; if ((open_flag & O_CREAT) && d_is_dir(nd->path.dentry)) goto out; in do_last(). The former is "can't open them rw or w", the latter - "can't have O_CREAT on those". With O_CREAT|O_RDWR as in your example either one would trigger (in reality the latter will trigger first and the call of may_open() several lines below won't be reached at all). -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-fsdevel" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html