After the posting indicating that sort was the culprit, I figured I'd take
a look. It appears that a function, called xtmpfopen(), is called to
return a stream to the temp file, that stream is created via a call to
fdopen() after open() returns a file descriptor to the file being opened.
Soooo, it seemed to me that if we ored in O_EXCL in the option list for
open(), that would solve our problem. Now, sort will fail, causing
updatedb to fail, but hey, which is better, no password file, or an
out-of-date locate database? I tested this on my machine, and it appears
to work fine.
Hopefully the following patch provides a remedial solution for those who
still want their updatedb to run as root. Also, I figured this would help
if other software makes use of sort (I was surprised to find updatedb was a
shell script), or an unsuspecting someone may use sort as root every once
in a while. Also, this is quite an amateur investigation, so comments are
welcome.
Sort is in textutils, this applies to textutils 1.22 on ftp.gnu.org. cd
into textutils-1.22/src before applying the patch.
--- sort_orig.c Tue Mar 3 00:26:00 1998
+++ sort.c Tue Mar 3 00:25:32 1998
@@ -321,7 +321,7 @@
FILE *fp;
int fd;
- fd = open (file, O_WRONLY | O_CREAT | O_TRUNC, 0600);
+ fd = open (file, O_EXCL | O_WRONLY | O_CREAT | O_TRUNC, 0600);
if (fd < 0 || (fp = fdopen (fd, "w")) == NULL)
{
error (0, errno, "%s", file);
--------------------------
Michael A. Ballbach: N0ZTQ
ballbachat_private <--- PGP Key Here. (finger)
mikebat_private
http://ballbach.lorien.ml.org/
"I don't know how world war three will be fought, but world war four will
be fought with sticks and stones." -- Albert Einstein.
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