[PATCH 0/2] Fix a bad case of absolute path handling
Ken Brown
kbrown@cornell.edu
Wed Nov 10 22:22:05 GMT 2021
On 11/10/2021 3:32 PM, corinna-cygwin@cygwin.com wrote:
> From: Corinna Vinschen <corinna@vinschen.de>
>
> As I told Takashi in PM, I will try to more often send patches to the
> cygwin-patches ML before pushing them, so there's a chance to chime in.
LGTM.
> This patch series is supposed to address the `rm -rf' problem reported
> in https://cygwin.com/pipermail/cygwin/2021-November/249837.html
>
> It was always frustrating, having to allow DOS drive letter paths for
> backward compatibility. This here is another case of ambiguity,
> triggered by the `isabspath' macro handling "X:" as absolute path, even
> without the trailing slash or backslash.
>
> Check out the 2nd patch for a more detailed description.
>
> While at it, I wonder if we might have a chance to fix these ambiguities
> in a better way. For instance, consider this:
>
> $ mkdir -p test/c:
> $ cd test
>
> As non-admin:
>
> $ touch c:/foo
> touch: cannot touch 'c:/foo': Permission denied
>
> As admin, even worse:
>
> $ touch c:/foo
> $ ls /cygdrive/c/foo
> foo
>
> As long as we support DOS paths as input, I have a hard time to see how
> to fix this, but maybe we can at least minimize the ambiguity somehow.
I can't immediately think of anything. But is it really impossible to phase out
DOS path support over a period of time? We could start with a HEADS-UP, asking
for comments, then a deprecation announcement, then something like the old
dosfilewarning option, then a more forceful warning that can't be turned off,
and finally removal of support. This could be done over a period of several
years (not sure how many).
We could also put lines like
# C:/ on /c type ntfs (binary,posix=0)
into the default /etc/fstab.
Ken
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