bug#17618: ls -l dangerous when listing links (original) (raw)

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

From: Eric Blake
Subject: bug#17618: ls -l dangerous when listing links
Date: Wed, 28 May 2014 09:46:10 -0600
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.5.0

tag 17618 wontfix thanks

On 05/28/2014 07:36 AM, Michał Adamczyk wrote:

Call it a bug or call it a feature. It is dangerous though.

When using ls -l to list a directory with links in it, it will produce an output similar to this:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 user group 30 1980-01-01 00:01 linkname -> /path/to/destination/file

Since the output is empty, you'll get the target of that link overwritten with an empty file.

My suggestion is to change the representation symbols of link to something that won't get interpreted.

The use of "->" is required by POSIX: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/ls.html

> If the file is a symbolic link and the -L option is not specified, this > information shall be about the link itself and the field shall be > of the form: > > "%s -> %s", , >

So we can't change it unless we add a NEW option; but adding a new option means that it won't be available by default.

There have been suggestions in the past about using a UTF-8 arrow, but they have similarly been rejected. Sorry.

I'm closing this report, because we can't do anything about it; but feel free to add further comments.

-- Eric Blake eblake redhat com +1-919-301-3266 Libvirt virtualization library http://libvirt.org

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature