From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S932588AbVHTRae (ORCPT ); Sat, 20 Aug 2005 13:30:34 -0400 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S932589AbVHTRae (ORCPT ); Sat, 20 Aug 2005 13:30:34 -0400 Received: from smtp.osdl.org ([65.172.181.4]:35532 "EHLO smtp.osdl.org") by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S932588AbVHTRae (ORCPT ); Sat, 20 Aug 2005 13:30:34 -0400 Date: Sat, 20 Aug 2005 10:30:23 -0700 (PDT) From: Linus Torvalds To: Miklos Szeredi cc: viro@parcelfarce.linux.theplanet.co.uk, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Subject: Re: open("foo", 3) In-Reply-To: Message-ID: References: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org On Sat, 20 Aug 2005, Miklos Szeredi wrote: > > My question is: is this deliberate or accidental? Wouldn't it be more > logical to not require any permission to open such file? Or is there > some security concern with that? It's deliberate but historical. It's been a long time since I worked on it, but it was meant for "special opens". I _think_ it was used for things like "open block device without media check" etc (we use O_NONBLOCK for that now), and it was used for directory opens before we had O_DIRECTORY. (It's literally been years, so my recollection may be bogus). I don't think anything uses it any more, and it should probably be deprecated rather than extended upon. Linus