Re: Bug#554893: startup script should be more careful with chown -R

[The Fungi <fungi@yuggoth.org>]

On Sun, Nov 08, 2009 at 07:13:25PM +0300, Michael Tokarev wrote:
[...]
> And as others in #debian pointed out the overlooked obvious, `chown -R'
> follows symlinks.  So it's sufficient to put a symlink to /etc/passwd into
> /var/lib/nsd3 to get the system 0wned.
[...]

Not to downplay the original bug (removed from Cc), but have you
tested the above claim? This didn't match my recollection, so I
checked and found (at least using the one from coreutils under sid)
that chown doesn't follow either symlinks in the tree or even
specified as a parameter...

$ whoami
user1
$ mkdir foo bar
$ touch bar/baz
$ ln -s ../bar foo/xyzzy
$ ln -s ../bar/baz foo/plugh
$ sudo chown -R user2:user2 foo
$ ls -al bar
total 3
drwxr-xr-x  2 user1 user1   72 2009-11-08 17:15 .
drwx--x--x 38 user1 user1 2648 2009-11-08 17:14 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 user1 user1    0 2009-11-08 17:15 baz
$ ls -al foo
total 3
drwxr-xr-x  2 user2 user2   96 2009-11-08 17:15 .
drwx--x--x 38 user1 user1 2648 2009-11-08 17:14 ..
lrwxrwxrwx  1 user2 user2   10 2009-11-08 17:15 plugh -> ../bar/baz
lrwxrwxrwx  1 user2 user2    6 2009-11-08 17:15 xyzzy -> ../bar
$ sudo chown -R user2:user2 foo/xyzzy
$ ls -al foo/xyzzy/
total 3
drwxr-xr-x  2 user1 user1   72 2009-11-08 17:15 .
drwx--x--x 38 user1 user1 2648 2009-11-08 17:14 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 user1 user1    0 2009-11-08 17:15 baz
$ sudo chown -R user2:user2 foo/plugh
$ ls -al bar
total 3
drwxr-xr-x  2 user1 user1   72 2009-11-08 17:15 .
drwx--x--x 38 user1 user1 2648 2009-11-08 17:14 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 user1 user1    0 2009-11-08 17:15 baz

Unless I'm missing something subtle, symbolic links shouldn't be a
concern here.
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