this is actually the sort command (which uses the qsort()) call that is making this files. one work around is to set the TMPDIR environment variable to a directory that only root can access. sort will then write its temporary files to that directory instead of /tmp jeff Cain <cainat_private> writes: > If this is already known, my apologies. It seemed very strange that this > worked, so I thought it would be mentionable. > > On many linux systems(Redhat imparticularly) updatedb is run nightly > around 1:00. When it sorts the files that find gets, it creats a few files > in /tmp called sort0<pid>000{1,2,etc}. Each is around 512k. The > first file is created and filled, then if necassary, another is created > and so on until it has your whole filesystem into a nice database. Well, > once the first file is created you can easily guess what the next filename > will be called as only the last character will change. If you create a > link to say, the shadow password file, updatedb will kindly overwrite it > for you. Ex: > > <assuming updatedb is running in the background> > $ ls /tmp > sort012340000 sort012340001 > > $ ln -s /etc/shadow /tmp/sort012340002 > <wait for awhile to give updatedb time to write to our link> > > $ ls /tmp > sort012340000 sort012340001 sort012340002 sort012340003 > > It's done, it will now clear out it's files from /tmp. Now go look at the > shadow password file. It will be quite larger then it was before. About > 512k is it's new size. I played with this for awhile but couldn't find > anyway to write anything useful to any file except /etc/shells so you can > ftp into the system no matter what your specified shell is.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Fri Apr 13 2001 - 13:43:39 PDT