Re: [PATCH] Do _not_ call unlink on a directory

From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
Date: Jul 17, 2007, 08:58 UTC
Message-ID: <86vecj1k65.fsf@lola.quinscape.zz>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.0.999.0707161252330.20061@woody.linux-foundation.org>

Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> writes:

Show 12 quoted lines

> On Mon, 16 Jul 2007, Thomas Glanzmann wrote:
>>
>> Calling unlink on a directory on a Solaris UFS filesystem as root makes it
>> inconsistent. Thanks to Johannes Sixt for the obvious fix.
>
> Ack, I think this is the right thing to do.
>
> As pointed out, it doesn't _guarantee_ that git won't call
> "unlink()" on a directory (race conditions etc), but that's
> fundamentally true (there is no "funlink()" like there is
> "fstat()"), and besides, that is in no way git-specific (ie it's
> true of *any* application that gets run as root).

Please note that doing "remove" before "mkdir" without checking for directoriness still offers a race window where one can slip in a new non-directory file.

-- 
David Kastrup