Re: symlink side effect

[Earl Hood <earl@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On August 22, 2005 at 18:03, Jeff Breidenbach wrote:

> Most messages archived fine, then we hit one that had an attachment
> and tried to create a directory to put the attachment in. Well, that
> triggered some unusual code in mhfile.pl that decided to delete the
> symlink, create an empty directory, then mhonarc got confused as to
> why all the message pages had disappeared. Everything went downhill
> from there.

The symlink check is done to prevent local symlink attacks.

Somebody else recently reported a problem with mhonarc's behavior:
<https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?func=detailitem&item_id=13853>.
Please post a follow-up to the report providing specifics of your
case.  Also provide any diagnostic messages mhonarc produces
(for symlink stuff, mhonarc should generate a warning or error).

The problem is only if the final pathname component is a symlink.
A work-around is to not have the attachment directory be a symlink.

If I understand your problem correctly, I am guessing that you
have attachments being placed in the same location as the archive
directory.  And the archive directory is actually a symlink?

--ewh