From: Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org>
To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Who's behind the UNIX filesystem permission
Date: Wed, 7 Aug 2019 12:35:49 +1000 (EST) [thread overview]
Message-ID: <alpine.BSF.2.21.9999.1908071225090.81938@aneurin.horsfall.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20190801234351.04A9118C0A1@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
On Thu, 1 Aug 2019, Noel Chiappa wrote:
> Maybe the application was written by a LISP programmer? :-)
>
> (Not really, of course; it was probably just someone who didn't know much
> about Unix. They had a list of system calls, and 'unlink' probably said ' only
> works on directories when the caller is root', so...)
I dimly recall that there was a little-documented utility /etc/unlink
which did just that; it was probably not on all systems, but was on our
CCI Power 6/32.
I only discovered their incompetence at the next reboot, when I had to
clean up all the orphaned (but temporary) files that were left behind
because [idn]check went berserk (we didn't have fsck back then).
-- Dave
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2019-08-07 2:36 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 16+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2019-08-01 23:43 Noel Chiappa
2019-08-02 1:03 ` David Arnold
2019-08-02 4:36 ` Rob Pike
2019-08-07 2:35 ` Dave Horsfall [this message]
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2019-08-02 14:35 Noel Chiappa
2019-08-02 15:01 ` Clem Cole
2019-08-02 15:17 ` Arthur Krewat
2019-08-02 21:23 ` Dave Horsfall
2019-08-03 12:51 ` Nemo
2019-08-01 12:35 Doug McIlroy
2019-08-01 16:22 ` John P. Linderman
2019-08-01 16:35 ` Arthur Krewat
2019-08-01 17:01 ` Nemo Nusquam
2019-08-01 18:26 ` Arthur Krewat
2019-08-01 20:14 ` Lyndon Nerenberg
2019-08-01 21:23 ` Dave Horsfall
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=alpine.BSF.2.21.9999.1908071225090.81938@aneurin.horsfall.org \
--to=dave@horsfall.org \
--cc=tuhs@tuhs.org \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).