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From(Linus Torvalds)
SubjectRe: Open by inode? (was Re: knfsd)
Date11 Jan 1999 07:38:49 GMT
In article <19990107101800.A2026@tantalophile.demon.co.uk>,
Jamie Lokier  <lkd@tantalophile.demon.co.uk> wrote:
>There's really no need for extra syscalls for open-by-inode.
>
>Implement /proc/inode/NNN instead...

Note that open-by-inode() is fundamentally broken, and will not be
implemented. There are several reasons:

 - it bypasses directory-based security.

   You can work around this, sure, but basically it's a nasty piece of
   business. 

 - it breaks any filesystems that don't work by inode number. For
   example, a number of filesystems _need_ to know the full pathname:
   any well-thought-out network filesystem (and no, I don't consider NFS
   to be well-thought-out) will use pathnames, and even local
   filesystems like a basic cdrom filesystem needs to know the full path
   (iso9660 does not have ".." on disk - so you need to know your path
   in order to know where ".." is)

Basically, only "open by name" is well-defined, anything else is a
old-fashioned concept that only makes sense on UNIX-only (and old at
that) filesystems.

			Linus

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