Re: snapshot 20050114 race (on list)

["Pierre A. Humblet" <Pierre dot Humblet at ieee dot org>]

At 04:35 PM 1/22/2005 -0500, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>On Sat, Jan 22, 2005 at 04:28:13PM -0500, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>>On Sat, Jan 22, 2005 at 04:25:28PM -0500, Christopher Faylor wrote:
>>>On Mon, Jan 17, 2005 at 10:25:51PM -0500, Pierre A. Humblet wrote:
>>>>At 10:15 PM 1/17/2005 -0500, you wrote:
>>>>>On Mon, Jan 17, 2005 at 09:30:11PM -0500, Pierre A. Humblet wrote:
>>>>>>It's not a Cygwin handle.  It's an internal Windows handle to the
>>>>>>current working directory.  Ah! Doing a chdir to C:\ just before
>>>>>>alerting would fix this, except in the case of being terminated.
>>>>>
>>>>>If the process is terminated wouldn't this be a non-issue?
>>>>
>>>>It depends on the timing between the pipe being closed by Windows
>>>>and the cwd handle being closed. This won't keep me awake.
>>>
>>>I put the SetCurrentDirectory suggestion into the latest cygwin but it
>>>just occurred to me that this needs to be called unconditionally since
>>>an execed child could exit prior to the stub exiting so, something like:
>>>
>>>  int bar;
>>>  mkdir ("/foo", 0777);
>>>  chdir ("/foo");
>>>  if (!fork ())
>>>    exec ("/bin/pwd");
>>>  wait (&bar);
>>>  chdir ("/");
>>>  rmdir ("/foo");
>>>
>>>wouldn't be guaranteed to work since there could be a stub that was
>>>still cd'ed to "/foo" even after "/bin/pwd" has finished executing.
>>
>>Oh *@#$%!
>>
>>Keeping the SetCurrentDirectory in exit won't work.  It has to happen
>>prior to the exec or there's still a race.
>
>...but if you do it before the exec you'll screw up native windows
processes...
>
>Ah, the fun.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dllproc/bas
e/createprocess.asp

lpCurrentDirectory
    [in] Pointer to a null-terminated string that specifies the full path
to the current directory for the process. The string can also specify a UNC
path.

    If this parameter is NULL, the new process will have the same current
drive and directory as the calling process. (This feature is provided
primarily for shells that need to start an application and specify its
initial drive and working directory.)
lpStartupInfo

Pierre