context-dependent files (was Re: SUID directories -- security concern?)

[Barry Margolin]

In article <4555 at hemuli.tik.vtt.fi> tml at hemuli.tik.vtt.fi (Tor Lillqvist) writes:
>The context-dependent files in HP-UX is IMHO a rather clever idea.  A
>bit like Apollo's symbolic links containing environment variables.  Is
>there any chance of other vendors taking up the idea?

I hope not.  In networked environments these kinds of things cause serious
problems.  Not all file server clients are Unix systems, and they don't
necessarily have the concept of environment variables.  On Symbolics Lisp
Machines, which have been accessing network file servers for over a decade,
one writes "host:path", and the effect is to access the same file as a user
on the host would if he typed that pathname.  When it accesses a Unix NFS
server it has to go through many contortions in order to access the same
file that a user of the Unix system would.  It has to read the remote
system's mtab or fstab file and interpret automounts relative to the remote
host.

Now that distributed file systems are so popular, please don't add more
attributes that make it hard for non-Unix systems to access files.

--
Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar at think.com
{uunet,harvard}!think!barmar