Possible security problem, need information..

[Heiko Blume]

jik at athena.mit.edu (Jonathan I. Kamens) writes:

>In article <1991Mar22.000333.22597 at scuzzy.in-berlin.de>, src at scuzzy.in-berlin.de (Heiko Blume) writes:
>|> # mv test2 test
>|> mv: test: 644 mode?y
>|> mv: cannot unlink .
>|> mv: permission denied
>|> 
>|> but what does the 'mv: cannot unlink .' mean???? ain't got no clue...

>  My guess is that you're working on a system that does not have a rename
>system call, so mv works by unlinking the target name, if it exists, then
>creating a hard link from the old source name to the target name, then
>unlinking the old source name.

ISC 2.2.1 does have rename(2) [btw: it even passed the POSIX compliance test
suite (PCTS 1.0) of NIST], but who knows if mv uses it?

>  Since /tmp/test is owned by root, mv can't unlink it.

sure, i just wondered why it said '.' instead of 'test'.

>  Although there appears to be a bug in your version of mv, because it tried
>to print the filename and failed.  Probably a missing argument to fprintf or
>something.

that's what i guess/hope now, too. wouldn't be too nice if it really
tried to unlink(".") ....
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