makedir ownership question

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Mon, Oct 31, 2005 at 02:53:49PM -0500, Kenneth Brody wrote:
> Quoting Jay R. Ashworth (Mon, 31 Oct 2005 14:37:56 -0500):
> > On Mon, Oct 31, 2005 at 01:03:14PM -0500, Fairlight wrote:
> > > Question here...  Why does 'makedir' from fP need to be suid root?  To
> [...]
> > ISTR that some kernels require that root make directories, though I
> > couldn't tell you why I think that.  Especially since my /bin/mkdir
> > isn't SUID root.
> 
> Because this used to be true.  Before the mkdir(2) system call came along,
> it used to be that directories were created with the mknod(2) system call,
> which shows as one failure mode:
> 
>     [EPERM] The process's effective user ID is not super-user.

A*ha*!

(It's a detective thing)

> It may be that fp/lib/makedir will work just fine as setuid filepro on
> your system.

Noted.

Is it worth changing the default in the install these days, perhaps
with a test program to switch it back?

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra at baylink.com
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