Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Fri, 13 Dec 1996 00:13:41 -0800 | From | Steve VanDevender <> | Subject | Re: Proposal: restrict link(2) |
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Dan Merillat writes: > Now, like I said, do we _REALLY_ like the connotations of being able to link > (and therefore modify) files that we don't have write permissions to?
"And therefore modify?" I get the impression that some of the people who are arguing about this don't at all understand the semantics of link().
If you link /etc/shadow to /tmp/shadow, you have done none of the following:
* changed the permissions of /tmp/shadow * changed the owner or group owner of /tmp/shadow
Not only have you not changed those, you cannot change those. You have created another reference to the inode, and that's all.
You cannot use hard links to defeat the permissions for a file. Even if you manage to make a link to a temporary file, once the original user of the temporary file is done with it the link you created remains with _exactly the same permissions and ownerships_ that the original user created it with. If that person did his job right, then the most you can manage with a hard link is to possibly fill up the filesystem by nabbing links to a lot of temporary files so that when the creator unlink()s their temp files it doesn't free up the file space.
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