Re: chmod/chown -R - maybe an ITP

[karlheg@inetarena.com (Karl M. Hegbloom)]

>>>>> "Greg" == Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu> writes:

    Greg> BSD libc provides a generic recurse-safely kind of function
    Greg> with some suitably inscrutable acronym (I'm told "fts"). The
    Greg> idea is to implement this critical code once correctly
    Greg> somewhere common so applications don't have to reinvent the
    Greg> wheel and introduce security holes every time.

 `man 3 ftw'  I don't know if it is proof against the race that
 `tmpreaper' was written to prevent or not.

    Greg> It's quite tricky to do right, you have to hold open file
    Greg> descriptors for all your parent directories and compare them
    Greg> to ".." as you recurse down, and you have to do
    Greg> lstats,fstats etc on everything before and after you open
    Greg> it.